Norman Lowe - Mastering Twentieth Century Russian History-Palgrave Macmillan (2002)

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Mastering
Twentieth-Century
Russian History
Norman Lowe
palgrave
© Norman Lowe 2002
AU rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lowe, Norman.
Mastering twentieth-century Russian history / Norman Lowe.
p. cm.— (Palgrave master series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 -3 3 3 -9 6 3 0 7 -5 (pbk.)
1. Russia— History— 20th century— Outlines, syllabi, e tc 2. Soviet
Union— History— Outlines, syllabi, etc. 3. Russia (Federation)— History— 1991—
Outlines, syllabi, etc. I. Title: Mastering 20th century Russian history. II. Title.
III. Series.
DK246 1 6 8 2002
947.084— dc21
2001059834
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
11 10 09 08 07
Printed and bound in China

For Nathaniel, Millie and Anna
Mounds of human heads recede into the distance,
I am diminishing there - already I’ll not be noticed;
but in warm-hearted books and in children’s games
I’ll rise from the dead to say that the sun is shining.
Osip Mandelstam, 1936-37
[Poems from Mandelstam, translated by R.H. Morrison, Farleigh Dickinson

University Press, London and Toronto, 1990]
■ u Contents
List of maps x
List of illustrations xi
Preface xii
Acknowledgements xiii
Glossary xiv
Note on dates xvii
Chronology of main events xviii
1 Introduction: Russia in the twentieth century 1

1.1 An overview of Russian history in the twentieth century 1
1.2 The writing of Russian history 4
Notes 9
2 Russia before the First World War 10

Summary of events 10
2.1 Russian government and society before 1905 11
2.2 Revolutionary ideas and parties 24
2.3 The revolution of 1905 32
2.4 Russian agriculture in 1914 - how backward was it? 37
2.5 Russian industry in 1914 - how ‘modern’ was it? 41
2.6 The political system after 1905 - the Duma experiment 44
2.7 Was the collapse of Tsarism inevitable by 1914? 49
Documents 55
Notes 61
3 The First World War and the collapse of Tsarism, 1914-17 62

3.1 Russia's foreign relations and the approach of war 65
3.2 The war and its impact on the Tsarist system 75
Documents 86
Notes 90
4 The failure of the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik

seizure of power, February-October 1917 92
4.1 The failure of the Provisional Government 94
C o ntents v ii
4.2 The Bolshevik seizure of power - October 1917 105
4.3 Coup or mass insurrection? 108
Documents
Notes 118
5 Lenin and the Bolsheviks in power, 1917-24 119

5.1 The political situation - the Constituent Assembly 124
5.2 Land and economic problems 128
5.3 Russia withdraws from the First World War 132
5.4 The drift towards violence 136
5.5 The Civil War 141
5.6 The New Economic Policy (NEP) 154
5.7 Foreign affairs and the Communist International 164
5.8 Russia, government, nationalities and the1922 constitution 166
5.9 Education, culture, the arts and religion under the Bolsheviks 174
5.10 Assessments of Lenin 180
Documents 186
Notes 191
6 Stalin in control - Russia transformed 193

6.1 Trotsky or Stalin? The struggle for power after Lenin's death 195
6.2 The end of the New Economic Policy: why was it abandoned? 203
6.3 The collectivization of agriculture 207
6.4 Industry and the Five-Year Plans ^218
6.5 Politics and the Purges 230
6.6 Everyday life and culture under Stalin 244
Documents 258
Notes N 263
7 The Great Patriotic War and Stalin's Last Years,1941-53 267

7.1 Foreign relations and the background to war 269
7.2 The USSR at war, 1941-45 . 282
7.3 The aftermath of the war and Stalin's final years, 1945-53 310
7.4 The beginnings of the Cold War 316
7.5 Assessments of Stalin 329
Documents 334
Notes 340
8 The Khrushchev era and de-Stalinization, 1953-64 342

8.1 The rise of Khrushchev and the attack on Stalin, 1953-57 343
8.2 Problems and new policies 352
8.3 Foreign affairs: co-existence and the Cold War 361
8.4 Downfall and assessment of Khrushchev 369
vHi Contents
Documents 373
Notes 375
9 The Brezhnev years - the USSR stagnates, 1964-85 377

9.1 Personnel and policies 378
9.2 Everyday life, dissent and opposition 383
9.3 Brezhnev and eastern Europe 387
9.4 Foreign affairs and détente 389
9.5 The end of an era 392
Documents 396
Notes 399
10 Gorbachev and the end of the Soviet Union, 1985-91 401

10.1 The struggle for reform 403
10.2 Foreign affairs - the end of the Cold War 409
10.3 The end of communism in eastern Europe 412
10.4 Gorbachev runs into problems 417
10.5 The USSR disintegrates 424
10.6 Assessments of Gorbachev 438
Documents 446
Notes 451
11 Russia under Yeltsin, 1991-99 453

11.1 Economic catastrophe and political crisis, 1992-93 454
11.2 The end of ‘market romanticism’ 463
11.3 Yeltsin’s second term, 1996-99 468
Documents 474
Notes 477
Suggestions for further reading 479

Index 485
■ I List o f maps
2.1 Western Russia about 1900 21

3.1 The Russian Empire at the time of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5 66
3.2 The Balkans showing the situation after the Balkan Wars, 1912-13 71
3.3 Russian operations during the First World War 76
5.1 Russian losses by the Treaty ofBrest-Litovsk, 1918 135
5.2 The Civil War 144
5.3 The USSR before the Second World War 173
6.1 The expansion of Soviet industry and labour camps under Stalin 228
7.1 The German invasion of the USSR 284
7.2 Soviet expansion 1939-49 and the Iron Curtain 324
■ y List o f illustrations
1.1 The Tsar Nicholas II and his fam ily shortly before the outbreak of the
First World War in 1914. His wife, Alexandra Fedorovna, is sitting on his
right, and their daughter, Anastasia, on his left. Behind are the other three
daughters, Marie, Tatiana and Olga. Sitting in front is the Tsarevich Alexis 2
2.1 Extremes o f wealth and poverty: a dinner party in the palace of
Countess Shuvalov, in St Petersburg 14
2.2 Extremes of wealth and poverty: a soup kitchen for the poor and
unemployed in St Petersburg 15
3.1 The Petrograd Garrison joins forces with the workers during
the February revolution - 27 February 1917 64
4.1 The !July Days' in Petrograd, 1917. Provisional Government troops
fire on a demonstration in the Nevsky Prospekt 93
5.1 Bolshevik Civil War poster: 'Kazak! Whose side are you on? Ours or theirs?* 121
5.2 Lenin and Stalin looking pleased with themselves at Gorky in 1922 171
6.1 A poster of the early 1930s advocating collectivization. The banner
reads *We are completing unbroken collectivization*. The caption
below reads: *We are completing victory in making socialist changes
in agriculture*. 210
7.1 German soldiers executefive young men from Velizh, Smolensk district,
suspected of being partisans, summer 1942 288
7.2 The siege of Leningrad - women mourn the shrouded corpse of a child
who has died from starvation 300
7.3 A rare photograph of the leader and his henchmen, on their way to
a sports meeting in Moscow in 1945. From left to right: Khrushchev,
Stalin, Malenkov, Beria and Molotov 315
8.1 Khrushchev showing off the fruits of his maize campaign in
Kazakhstan, 1961 354
9.1 Brezhnev speaking at a public meeting during a visit to Bulgaria,
September 1973 380
10.1 The Moscow Summit, May 1988. Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa,
greet Reagan and his wife, Nancy, in the Kremlin. From left to right:
Mrs Gorbachev, Reagan, Gorbachev, Mrs Reagan 408
11.1 Yeltsin meets the public during the June 1996 election campaign 467
List o f illustrations xi
■ Z Preface
It must have been somewhere around 1986 when I first suggested to the editors
of the Master Series that a volume on twentieth-century Russian history might be
a good idea. Nothing came of it at the time, and as events turned out, they were
absolutely right to wait. It is now possible to deal with the whole of the twentieth
century, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, which happened so dramat
ically and unexpectedly in 1991. The ensuing ten years have given historians time
to wallow in the newly opened archives and to begin to try and put the Soviet
experiment into some sort of perspective. It may be thought that yet another
history of modem Russia is hardly necessary, given the large number which have
appeared in the last few years, written by leading scholars. Many of these books
are specialized and highly detailed, and can therefore be confusing for students
beginning a study of Russian history for the first time. It seems to me that there is
a need for a book which provides a clear introduction to the complexities of the
subject, an overview of the twentieth century in Russia, a summary of the main
historiographical debates, and a guide for further study. I hope I have succeeded
in producing exactly this. Both in the text and in the documents for discussion,
I have also tried to give something of the flavour of what the Russian people and
their associated nationalities have experienced and suffered during the twentieth
century. The book is aimed principally at Advanced Level students, and under
graduates studying History and Politics; I hope that the general reader interested
in this period of Russian history will also find it approachable.
I have not worked in the archives, and therefore I owe a great debt of gratitude
to all those scholars over the last twenty years whose researches I have made use
of and who are acknowledged in the notes (at the end of each chapter) and in the
suggestions for further reading (at the end of the book). I am grateful also to my
friends Glyn Jones, formerly of Bede College, Billingham, Michael Hopkinson, for
merly Head of History at Harrogate Grammar School, and James Brindle, who read
the manuscript and made many helpful and sometimes vital suggestions; to my
wife, Jane, who helped to eradicate numerous errors and polish up my English;
and to Suzannah Burywood and Philippa Thomas of Palgrave for their patience,
encouragement and advice.
■ S Acknowledgements
The author and publishers would like to thank the following photographic
sources: Novosti (London), pp. 2,14, 15,315, 354, 380,467; AGK London, pp. 64,
93,121,171, 210,288,300,408.
The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to
reproduce copyright material:
Extracts from A People’s Tragedy. The Russian Revolution by Orlando Figes,

published by Jonathan Cape (1996), used by permission of the Random House
Group Limited.
Extracts from Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy by Dmitri Volkogonov, translated

by Harold Shukman (2000 edition), reproduced by permission of Phoenix
Press.
Extracts from An Economic History of the USSR 1917-1991 (third revised edi
tion 1992) by Alec Nove reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Limited.
Extracts from Lenin’s Tomb. The Last Days of the Soviet Empire © 1993 by
David Remnick (Penguin, New York). Reprinted by permission of the author.
The verse by Osip Mandelstam on page vi, from Poems from Mandelstam,
translated by R.H. Morrison, is reprinted by permission of Associated Univer
sity Presses, Cranbury, New Jersey, USA.
The poem by Osip Mandelstam on page 263, from Hope Against Hope: A Mem
oir (1999 edition) by Nadezhda Mandelstam, translated by Max Hayward, is
reprinted by permission of The Harvill Press Ltd.
Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been
inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary
arrangement at the first opportunity.
Acknowledgements xiii
■ y Glossary
apparat The administrative apparatus of the Communist Party

apparatchik Someone who works in the party administration
artel A co-operative work group, especially a farm collective
Article 6 The article in the Soviet constitution which gave the
Communist Party the right to be the only political party in
the USSR
blat Informal system of favours and connections
Bolsheviks Meaning ‘majority' - the name taken by Lenin and his
supporters after the Social Democrat party split in 1903; it
eventually became the Communist Party.
bourgeoisie Term used by the Marxists to describe the capitalist middle
classes
CCorCCCP Central Committee of the Communist Party
Cheka The secret police set up by Lenin; it kept changing its title,
becoming in turn GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD and KGB
Comecon The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance among the
eastern bloc countries
Cominform The Communist Information Bureau for the eastern bloc
countries
Comintern The Communist International, set up in 1919 to further the
cause of world revolution. It was dissolved by Stalin in 1943
Commissar A minister or other high official in the Soviet government
CPSU The Communist Party of the Soviet Union
dacha A house in the country
dekulakization Removal of kulaks to Siberia, the Urals or labour camps
during collectivization
Duma The elected lower house of the Russian parliament 1906-17
and again after December 1993
FRG Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)
FYP Five-Year Plan
GDR German Democratic Republic (East Germany)
glasnost Gorbachev's policy of openness or frankness
GOSPLAN The State Planning Commission - the body which had
overall responsibility for the economy, until the USSR ended
in 1991
Iskra Meaning ‘spark'; the name of the Social Democrat
newspaper founded by Lenin and Martov in 1898
Izvestiya Meaning literally ‘news’; the name of the official newspaper
of the Soviet government
x lv Glossary
Kadets Constitutional Democrats (the main liberal party up to
October 1917)
KGB Committee of State Security (earlier known as the Cheka),
secret police
kolkhoz Collective farm; it means literally ‘collective economy'
kolkhoznik A male worker on a collective farm
kolkhoznitsa A female worker on a collective farm
kombedy Committees of poor peasants
Komsomol The League of Young Communists
kulak A wealthy peasant; always used in a critical sense,
oras a term of abuse
Mensheviks Meaning ‘minority’; the name taken by the followers of
Plekhanov and Martov after the split in the Social Democrat
party in 1903
mir Village community; it also means ‘world’
Narkomindel The People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs
Narkomprod The People’s Commissariat of Supply
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NEP New Economic Policy
Nepman A private trader or manufacturer; somebody who did
well out of NEP
NKVD The secret police
NouyMir Means ‘New World’; a famous literary journal
Octobrists The liberal-conservative party which supported the
Tsar's October Manifesto after 1905
OGPU The secret police
Okhrana The Tsarist secret police
Oktyabr A literary journal
perestroika Gorbachev’s policy of reforming or restructuring
Politburo The top political committee of the Communist Party,
chosen by the party Central Committee. It was the main
decision-making body, or cabinet under the Soviet system.
From 1952 to 1966 it was known as the Presidium
Pood or pud Measurement of weight equivalent to 36 pounds
or 16.38 kg
Pravda Means literally ‘truth’; the official newspaper of the
Communist Party
Presidium Name given to the Politburo between
1952 and 1966
Prodrazverstka Compulsory delivery of surplus foodstuffs by the
peasants to the government
proletariat Marxist term for the revolutionary working class
Rabkrin Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate
RAPP Association of Proletarian Writers
RSDLP Russian Social Democrat Labour Party - see SDs
RSFSR Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic
SALT Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty
Glossary xv
SDs Social Democrats, a Marxist revolutionary party which split
into two factions in 1903: Bolsheviks (Majority) and
Mensheviks (Minority)
Soviet Council
sovkhoz State collective farm
Sovnarkhoz Council of the National Economy (1957-65) introduced by
Khrushchev
Sovnarkom Council of People's Commissars; in effect the government
from 1917 until 1946 when it became the USSR Council of
Ministers
SRs Socialist Revolutionaries, a non-Marxist revolutionary party
uskorenie Gorbachev’s policy of acceleration
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
vozhd Leader
Vperod Meaning ‘forward’; title chosen by Lenin for one of the
Bolshevik journals
VSNKh Supreme Council of the National Economy
War Communism The economic policy operated by the Soviet government
during the Civil War from June 1918 until March 1921, when
it was replaced by the NEP
Zemstvo Elected local government assembly at provincial and district
level from 1864 to 1917; dominated by nobility
Znamya Meaning literally ‘banner’ or ‘flag’; a well-known journal
■ Z N o te on dates
Until 1 February 1918 the Russians used the Julian calendar, which during the
nineteenth century was twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar used by the
rest of Europe, and then thirteen days behind until the end of January 1918, when
Russian dating was brought into line with the rest of the world. Thus Lenin was
bom in April 1870 - on the 10th by the Julian calendar in Russia, but on the 22nd
by the Gregorian calendar in Europe. The events which the Russians know as the
February revolution, beginning on 23 February 1917 (Julian), began on 8 March
as far as the rest of Europe was concerned. When the Bolsheviks took power on
25 October (Julian), it was 7 November in the rest of Europe. In the text the Julian
calendar is used for internal events, and the Gregorian calendar for international
events such as the First World War, until 1 February 1918.
■ Z Chronology o f main events
1854- 1856 Russian defeat in the Crimean War.

1855- 1881 Reign of Alexander II, the Tsar Liberator'.
1861 Emancipation of the serfs.
1878 Russia suffers diplomatic defeat at the Congress of Berlin.
1881 Assassination of Alexander II by the ‘People’s Will’.
188Í-1894 Reign of Alexander III.
1894 Jan.) Russia signs alliance with France.
1894 Death of Alexander III.
1894-1917 Reign of Nicholas II, the last Tsar.
1890s Witte and the 'great spurt’ in industrialization.
1902
March Lenin publishes What Is To Be Done?
1903
July-August Social Democrats split into two factions - Bolsheviks and
Mensheviks.
1904
February Russo-Japanese War begins; it ends in 1905 in defeat for
Russia. N*
1905
January Major strike in St Petersburg, organized by Father Gapon,
leads to Bloody Sunday and develops into the 1905
Revolution.
June Mutiny on the battleship Potemkin.
October St Petersburg Soviet formed. Nicholas signs October
Manifesto promising a Duma (parliament) and other
reforms.
November Moscow Soviet formed.
December Uprising in Moscow suppressed by force.
1906
April Stolypin becomes Minister of the Interior; opening of the
first Duma.
July Nicholas dissolves first Duma.
xviii Chronology of main events

August Stolypin begins his agrarian reforms.
1907
February Second Duma opens.
June Nicholas dissolves second Duma and changes the voting
rules.
August Russia signs an agreement with Britain, completing the
Triple Entente of Russia, France and Britain.
November Third Duma opens and stays in session until 1912.
1911
September Murder of Stolypin.
1912
February Lena goldminers' strike; troops kill 200 strikers.
April Strike spreads to St Petersburg; government bans unions,
but strikes continue through 1913 and into 1914.
November Fourth and last Duma opens.
1914-1918 First World War

1914
July Nicholas orders partial and then full Russian mobilization.
19 July/1 Aug. Germany declares war on Russia.
August Russians invade East Prussia but suffer heavy defeats, and
Galicia (Austria) where they capture Lemberg (Lwow), the
capital.
1915
April Germans invade Poland.
July/August Russians withdraw from Poland; Progressive Bloc formed -
demands that the Duma be allowed to form a government.
Nicholas assumes command of all Russian forces and
leaves Petrograd for military HQ.
1916
May/June Brusilov's offensive begins successfully, but does not
change the outcome of the war.
November Duma reconvenes and Milyukov makes his ‘stupidity or
treason' speech,
December Rasputin murdered.
1917
23 February Demonstrations in Petrograd turn violent, and on 25th
Nicholas orders them to be suppressed by force.
26-27 Feb. Troops mutiny; Petrograd Soviet elected.
2 March Nicholas II abdicates; Provisional Government formed
under Prince Lvov.
Chronology of main events xix
3April Lenin arrives in Petrograd in ‘sealed’ train, from exile in
Switzerland and soon publishes his April Theses.
May Lvov takes six socialists into his coalition; Kerensky
becomes War Minister. Trotsky arrives in Petrograd from
New York.
June/July Kerensky's offensive launched, but soon ends in failure.
3-5 July The ‘July Days’ lead to Lvov's resignation and unpopularity
for the Bolsheviks. Kerensky becomes prime minister.
24-31 August The Kornilov Affair discredits the right and helps revive
Bolshevik popularity.
25 October Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd.
26 October Lenin forms first Council of People's Commissars
(Sovnarkom) and issues its first decrees - on land and
peace.
November Elections for the Constituent Assembly; SRs win
most seats.
2 (15) Dec. Armistice signed with Germany.
1918
5-6 January Constituent Assembly meets but is closed at gunpoint by
Bolsheviks.
12 January Ukraine declares independence.
1 February Russia adopts Gregorian calendar, moving into line with the
rest of the world.
24 February Estonia declares independence.
March Capital moves to Moscow.
3 March Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed with Central Powers.
4 March Trotsky becomes Commissar for War and begins to
organize Red Army.
19 March Left SRs resign from Sovnarkom. \
22 April Transcaucasian Federation proclaims independence.
May Czechoslovak Legions take control of Trans-Siberian
Railway.
26-28 May Transcaucasian Federation breaks up into independent
republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
11 June Kombedy- committees of poor peasants formed. Abolished
in December.
14 June Bolsheviks expel Mensheviks and Right SRs from the
All-Russia Central Executive Committee of Soviets.
6 July Left SRs murder Mirbach and rebel against the Soviet
government.
16-17 July Nicholas II and family murdered by the Bolsheviks at
Yekaterinburg.
2 September Soviet government launches terror campaign against its
enemies.
November Whites declare Admiral Kolchak ‘Supreme Ruler’ of Russia.
18 November Latvia proclaims independence.
xx Chronology of main events

1919
March First Congress of the Communist International
(Comintern).
July Reds take Yekaterinburg; Kolchak driven eastwards.
October Denikin's Volunteer Force defeated.
Oct-Nov. Trotsky leads defence of Petrograd; Iudenich’s White forces
defeated.
1920
25 April Polish forces invade Ukraine, beginning Russo-Polish War.
28 April Red Army captures Baku and brings Azerbaijan back into
the Union.
2 December Armenia becomes a Soviet republic again.
1921
25 February Red Army occupies Georgia and makes it a Soviet
republic.
28 Feb.-18 Mar. Insurrection of sailors at Kronstadt; eventually suppressed
by force.
8-16 March Tenth Communist Party Congress: defeats Workers'
Opposition, bans factions within the party, and decides to
introduce the New Economic Policy (NEP).
18 March Russo-Polish War officially ends with the Treaty of Riga.
June Third Comintern Congress.
Summer onwards Serious famine in many parts of Russia.
1922
March Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan form Transcaucasian SSR.
26 March Lenin has his first stroke.
March-April Eleventh party Congress; Stalin becomes general secretary
of the party.
16 April Treaty of Rapallo signed with Germany.
Summer Clampdown on religious, literary and cultural freedom;
intellectuals exiled.
December Lenin begins to dictate his 'Testament'.
December New constitution formally inaugurates the USSR.
1923
9 March A further stroke effectively removes Lenin from politics.
Summer onwards The 'scissors crisis'.
1924
21 January Death of Lenin; Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin unite against
Trotsky.
22 May Leaders decide not to act on Lenin's 'Testament’.
Chronology of main events xxi

October Trotsky publishes Lessons of October, attacking Kamenev
and Zinoviev.
December • Stalin introduces ‘socialism in one country', supported by
Bukharin.
1925
January Trotsky forced to resign as Commissar for War.
December Stalin and Bukharin defeat the ‘Left’ Opposition at the 14th
party congress.
1926
January Trotsky and Zinoviev form United Opposition.
April Treaty of Berlin signed with Germany.
July/October Zinoviev, Trotsky and Kamenev removed from Politburo.
1927
April Chiang Kai-Shek launches his anti-communist campaign in
Shanghai.
May Britain breaks off diplomatic relations with USSR; ‘war
scare' begins.
September Problems as peasants reduce grain sales to the government.
November Trotsky and Zinoviev expelled from the Communist Party.
1928
January Trotsky exiled to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan.
January Stalin visits Siberia to investigate the problems with grain
supplies; begins to favour compulsory collectivization.
March Beginning of the ‘Cultural Revolution’.
May Shakhty trials begin.
July Bukharin and the ‘Right' oppose Stalin’s collectivization
policy.
October First Five-Year Plan for industry begins officially.
1929
9-10 February Bukharin and the ‘Right’ Opposition condemned by the
Politburo.
November Bukharin removed from the Politburo.
21 December Stalin's 50th birthday; usually taken as the beginning of the
‘Stalin Cult'.
27 December Stalin calls for the speeding up of collectivization and
dekulakization.
1930
July Litvinov becomes commissar for foreign affairs; favours
collective security.
November Ordzhonikidze takes over as director of industrialization.
xxii Chronology of main events
1931
June Stalin ends the 'Cultural Revolution’ and begins so-called
‘Great Retreat’.
September Japanese forces occupy the whole of Manchuria and declare
it independent.
1932
April RAPP and other workers’ cultural associations dissolved.
Autumn onwards Severe famine in Ukraine and other areas, lasting through
most of 1933.
October Opposition to Stalin develops - the Ryutin Affair.
November Stalin's wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, commits suicide.
December First Five-Year Plan declared completed.
1933
January Second Five-Year Plan begins.
January Hitler comes to power in Germany.
November USA formally recognizes the USSR and diplomatic relations
begin.
1934
18 September USSR enters League of Nations.
1 December Kirov assassinated in Leningrad; the Purges begin.
1935
1 January End of food rationing which had been in operation since
1930.
15-16 Jan. Kamenev and Zinoviev on trial; Kamenev given 10 years,
Zinoviev 5.
2 May USSR signs Treaty of Mutual Assistance with France.
July/August The Comintern drops its ‘world revolution' programme and
adopts ‘Popular Front’ line and collective security.
August Beginning of Stakhanovite campaign.
2 November Stalin makes his ‘life has become more joyous’ speech.
1936
January Stalin launches attack on Shostakovich’s opera, Lady
Macbeth ofMtsensk.
July Spanish Civil War begins.
19-24 August ‘Show trial’ of Kamenev and Zinoviev, who are both found
guilty and shot.
5 December Stalin’s new USSR constitution comes into operation.
1937
18 February Ordzhonikidze commits suicide.
Chronology of main events xxiii

May-June Army purges - Tukhachevsky and many other commanders
executed.
1938
13 March Russian language made compulsory in all schools in the
USSR.
2-13 March ‘Show-trial’ of Bukharin and other ‘Rightists’who are all
found guilty. Bukharin and 18 others executed.
30 September Munich agreement signed; Stalin feels betrayed by Britain
and France.
1939
3 May Molotov replaces Litvinov as commissar for foreign affairs.
May-August Soviet and Japanese troops clash.
23 August Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed; secret protocols
added later.
1 September Germans invade Poland, beginning Second World War,
which lasts until 1945.
17 September Soviet forces occupy eastern Poland, as agreed in the secret
protocols.
30 November War breaks out with Finland and lasts until 12 March 1940.
1940
April NKVD murder 15,000 Polish officers at Katyn.
August Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia brought into USSR, as agreed
in the protocols.
20 August Trotsky assassinated in Mexico.
1941 >
22 June Germans invade the USSR; the Great Patriotic War begins.
28 June Minsk falls to the Germans.
8 September The 900-day siege of Leningrad begins.
18 September Kiev captured by the Germans.
September Germans massacre 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar, near Kiev.
30 September The battle for Moscow begins.
7 December Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, bringing the USA into the
war.
May-July Germans advance eastwards and reach Stalingrad.

17 July-2 Feb. 1943 Battle of Stalingrad; German Sixth Army forced to
surrender. First great Russian victory.
28 July Stalin issues his ‘Not one more step back’ order.
1943
23 May Stalin agrees to dissolve the Comintern.
xxiv Chronology of main events

5 July-23 Aug. The great tank battle of Kursk; another Russian victory.
September Stalin softens up on religion and allows the election of
a new Patriarch.
28 November Teheran Conference begins.
Nov.-Dee. Mass deportations of non-Russian groups begin, lasting
until the following May; including Kalmyks, Chechens and
Crimean Tatars.
1944
27 January Siege of Leningrad ends.
May Crimea finally cleared of German troops.
6 June The Second Front begins at last; Americans and British land
in Normandy.
3 July Minsk liberated.
Aug.-October Warsaw uprising crushed by the Germans.
1945
4-11 February Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill meet at the Yalta
Conference.
April-May Soviet campaign to capture Berlin ends in triumph
on 8 May.
8-9 May End of Second World War in Europe.
May-June Britain forcibly repatriates 50,000 Cossacks; many commit
suicide rather than return to the USSR.
17 July-2 Aug. Potsdam Conference.
6August USA drops first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
8 August USSR declares war on Japan and attacks Japanese forces in
Manchuria.
2 September Japanese surrender; Second World War ends.
1946
9 February George Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’. Cold War begins to get
under way.
5 March Churchill's ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri.
August Zhdanov begins his attack on writers and other cultural
figures.
1947
12 March Truman Doctrine declared.
5 June Marshall Plan announced but is rejected by USSR on behalf
of the east European states.
September The USSR sets up the Cominform in response to the
Marshall Plan.
1948
February Communists seize power in Czechoslovakia.
Chronology of main events xxv

27 March Breach between the USSR and Yugoslavia.
24 June Berlin blockade begins; lasts until Stalin admits defeat on 5
May 1949.
July-August The Leningrad Affair - purge of the party leaders in
Leningrad.
1949
April North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) formed.
1 October Mao Zedong announces formation of People’s Republic of
China.
1950
26 June Korean War begins: communist North Korea invades the
south; ends July 1953.
29 August The USSR successfully explodes its first atomic bomb.
1953
13 January So-called ’Doctors’ Plot' announced.
5 March Death of Stalin.
June Rising in East Berlin suppressed by Soviet troops.
26 June Beria arrested and later executed.
September Khrushchev becomes first secretary of the Communist
Party.
1954
February Khrushchev’s virgin lands scheme introduced.
1955
January Government accepts Khrushchev’s plan to ‘increaseHhe
area under maize’.
May USSR signs peace treaty with Austria. Formation of Warsaw
Pact announced.
July Geneva Summit - Khrushchev meets Eisenhower.
1956
February Khrushchev’s ’secret speech’ at 20th party Congress begins
de-Stalinization.
April Cominform dissolved.
June-October Unrest in Poland; Khrushchev flies to Warsaw and a
compromise is reached.
23 October Hungarian revolution begins; suppressed by Soviet forces
early in November.
1957
June Attempt to get rid of Khrushchev fails.
xxvi Chronology of main events

August USSR produces the inter-continental ballistic missile
(ICBM).
4 October USSR launches Sputnik, the first artificial Earth
satellite.
1958
October Pasternak awarded Nobel Literature Prize after publication
of Doctor Zhivago in Italy.
November Crisis over Berlin; ends with the building of the Berlin Wall
(August 1961).
1959
September Khrushchev pays his first visit to the USA; has successful
talks with Eisenhower at Camp David.
1960
April USSR’s rift with China becomes public knowledge.
1 May American U-2 spy plane is shot down near Sverdlovsk.
Khrushchev walks out of the Paris Summit in protest.
September Khrushchev attends UN in New York, and bangs his shoe on
the table.
1961
12 April Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space.
July Khrushchev meets Kennedy in Vienna.
October Stalin’s body removed from the mausoleum.
1962
June Demonstrations in Novocherkassk; 23 people killed as
troops restore order.
October Cuban missiles crisis.
1963
5 August Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed.
1964
14 October Khrushchev removed as first secretary and replaced by
Brezhnev.
1965
February Americans begin bombing of North Vietnam. Kosygin
begins his economic reform programme.
1966
February Trial of Sinyavski and Daniel.
Chronology o f main events xxvii

1967 Introduction of the five-day working week and other
reforms.
1968
Jan.-August 'Prague Spring’; ends when Soviet forces invade
and occupy Czechoslovakia. Brezhnev Doctrine
announced.
1969
March Fighting breaks out between Soviets and Chinese along
Siberian frontier.
October Solzhenitsyn awarded the Nobel Literature Prize.
1970
Sakharov and Chalidze form Human Rights
Committee.
12 August USSR signs Renunciation of Force Treaty with West
Germany. Kosygin's economic reforms largely abandoned
by the end of this year.
1971
3 September Four Power Agreement signed on the status of Berlin.
1972
May Brezhnev and Nixon sign SALT I in Moscow.
1974
February Solzhenitsyn deported by KGB.
* \
1975
1 August Helsinki agreement on human rights and international
co-operation signed.
December Sakharov awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1977
7 October Brezhnev’s new constitution for the USSR adopted.
1979
June Brezhnev and Carter sign SALT II in Vienna.
December Soviet troops move into Afghanistan; so US Senate refuses
to ratify SALT II.
1980
May Sakharov exiled to Gorky, a city closed to foreigners.
August Polish trade union, Solidarity, formed.
xxviii Chronology of main events

1981
13 December Polish leader, Jaruzelski, suppresses Solidarity and declares
martial law.
1982
10 November Brezhnev dies; Andropov becomes leader.
1983
March Reagan announces his Strategic Defence Initiative
(Star Wars).
1 September Soviets shoot down a Korean airliner with the loss of
269 lives.
1984
9 February Andropov dies and is succeeded by Chernenko.
1985
10 March Chernenko dies; Gorbachev becomes leader.
November Gorbachev's first meeting with Reagan, in Vienna.
1986
February Gorbachev announces his policy of glasnost
(openness).
26 April Nuclear explosion at Chernobyl in Ukraine.
October Gorbachev and Reagan’s summit meeting in Reykjavik,
Iceland.
December Gorbachev invites Sakharov to return to Moscow from
Gorky.
December Demonstrations in Kazakhstan when Gorbachev
appoints a Russian as party leader.
1987
Gorbachev tries to intensify his policy of perestroika
(restructuring).
November Yeltsin is sacked as Moscow party boss after criticizing
Politburo members.
December Gorbachev and Reagan sign the Intermediate Nuclear
Forces (INF) Treaty.
1988
January Law on State Enterprises comes into operation.
February Nagorno-Karabakh crisis begins.
13 March Nina Andreyeva’s letter demands return to
Stalinism.
April Geneva agreement ends war in Afghanistan.
Chronology o f main events xxlx

1989
April Government uses troops to suppress demonstrations in
Tbilisi, Georgia.
May Estonia and Lithuania declare sovereignty.
15-18 May Gorbachev's visit to Beijing; official reconciliation between
USSR and Cliina.
25 May Newly elected Congress of People's Deputies meets.
4 June Chinese government crushes democracy movement in
Tiananmen Square.
July onwards Striking miners demand independent trade unions and
more power to the Soviets.
24 August Non-communist government comes to power in Poland.
9 November Berlin Wall demolished.
29 December Non-communist elected president of Czechoslovakia.
1990
January Government sends troops to restore order
in Azerbaijan.
6 March Article 6 of constitution cancelled; USSR no longer
a one-party state.
March Non-communist governments elected in Hungary and East
Germany.
May Yeltsin elected Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet.
July Yeltsin resigns from the Communist Party.
August The ‘500 Days Programme' for a crash privatization
programme drawn up.
3 October Germany officially reunited.
15 October Gorbachev awarded Nobel Peace Prize.
20 December Shevardnadze resigns as foreign minister, warning of threat
of dictatorship. \
1991
January Soviet troops fire on demonstrators in Latvia and
Lithuania.
12 June Yeltsin elected president of the Russian Federation.
18-21 August Attempted coup by communist right-wingers to remove
Gorbachev fails.
25 August Gorbachev resigns as general secretary of the Communist
Party.
Autumn Attempts to preserve the USSR in some form collapse
when Ukraine and Belarus decide to become independent
states.
November Yeltsin bans Communist Party in Russia.
25 December Gorbachev resigns as president of the USSR.
31 December USSR ceases to exist. Commonwealth of Independent
States (CIS) begins.
xxx Chronology of main events

1992
2 January Gaidar launches his ‘shock therapy’ for a rapid shift to
a market economy, but it causes inflation, unemployment
and shortages.
14 December Yeltsin replaces Gaidar as prime minister with
Chernomyrdin.
1993
25 April Referendum shows strong support for Yeltsin’s policies, in
spite of problems.
September Yeltsin dissolves parliament and produces a new
constitution with elections for a state Duma. Parliament
resists and members occupy the White House.
3-4 October Yeltsin orders the army to storm the White House.
December New constitution approved; in the Duma elections,
communists and nationalists do better than radical
reformers.
1994
December Russian troops invade Chechnya which had declared
independence.
1995
December Duma election; communists again do well, but Yeltsin
remains president.
1996
June-July Yeltsin elected for a second term as president, defeating
Zyuganov, the communist leader.
Cease-fire agreed in Chechnya.
1997
2 April Russia and Belarus sign treaty of union.
27 May Yeltsin and NATO leaders sign an act of mutual
co-operation and security.
1998
August Miners strike, as economic crisis continues. Severe financial
crisis; rouble devalued.
Yeltsin appoints Primakov as prime ministen he begins to
stabilize situation.
1999
March Primakov replaced by Stepashin.
June Yeltsin protests at NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
Chronology of main events xxxi

August Stepashin replaced by Putin.
September Putin sends forces into Chechnya after terrorist bombs
explode in Moscow.
31 December Yeltsin retires as president; Putin becomes acting
president.
2000
March Putin elected president.
Mu I Introduction: Russia in the
twentieth century
I. I An overview of Russian history

in the twentieth century
On 6 May 1896, in the Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow, Nicholas II was
crowned Emperor and Autocrat of All Russia; Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Poland,
Siberia; Grand Prince of Lithuania, Podolia and Finland; Prince of Estonia, Livonia
and Bulgaria, and of lots of other areas as well. It was a splendid ceremony as
befitted the ruler of such vast territories, but unfortunately the coronation was
marked by tragedy. Thousands of people had flocked into Moscow to witness the
processions and celebrations, and the day after the ceremony there was a huge
gathering in the Khodynka Fields hoping to receive the commemorative tankards
and other gifts - free beer and sausage - which were traditionally distributed on
such occasions. The crowds were tightly packed round the distribution points,
and as more people arrived, a rumour went round that there wouldn’t be enough
for everybody. Those at the back began to push to try and get closer, and things
got out of control. Suddenly there was a great surge forward and many in the
front ranks were trampled on and crushed. When calm was restored and the
crowds dispersed, 1280 bodies were left behind and at least 10,000 people had
been injured. Public opinion was outraged when Nicholas allowed the celebra
tions to go ahead as planned over the next few days; he even went so far as to
attend a ball the same evening while the dead were being carried away.
This tragedy was seen by many people as an ill-omen for the future of Nich
olas’s reign. In fact the next hundred years turned out to be full of trauma for the
unfortunate peoples of the Russia empire. By 1905 Russia had suffered military
defeat at the hands of Japan, a nation not previously considered to be in the first
rank, and was in the throes of a revolution which forced Nicholas to make some
half-hearted concessions. In 1914 the Russians became involved in the First
World War and found themselves invaded by German forces. As defeat followed
defeat, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate (February 1917) and the autocratic
monarchy was at an end. Under the Provisional Government it seemed that
Russia was to have some form of democracy, but the new rulers were no more
successful than the Tsar had been in dealing with the problems facing the coun
try. The situation continued to deteriorate; in October 1917 Lenin and the Bol
sheviks seized power and soon took Russia out of the war.
The new government, under the leadership of Lenin, did not at first bring
stability: its policies provoked a great deal of opposition leading to a civil war
Introduction: Russia in the twentieth century I

M astering T w en tieth -C e n tu ry Russian H istory
Figure 1.1 The Tsar Nicholas II and his fam ily shortly before the outbreak o f the First World War in 1914. His wife, Alexandra Fedorovna, is sitting on
his right, and their daughter, Anastasia, on his left. Behind are the other three daughters, Marie, Tatiana and Olga. Sitting in front is the Tsarevich Alexis.
which lasted until 1921. Ordinary people - especially peasants - in most areas of
Russia and her empire suffered hardships as both sides seized grain to feed their
armies, and both sides committed innumerable atrocities. The Bolsheviks, who
now called themselves Communists, won the war, and by the time of Lenin's
death in January 1924, most of the elements of the USSR (Union of Soviet Social
ist Republics) were in place - central control of the economy and administration
and a one-party dictatorship. After the death of Lenin there was a power struggle
from which, by 1929, Stalin had emerged as the leader. He remained in power
until his death in 1953, and during that quarter of a century nobody was immune
from the effects of his drastic policies. Basically these consisted of modernization
by force - the Five-Year Plans regimented workers in a vast industrialization
campaign and peasants were coerced into joining the collectivization of agricul
ture. In addition came famine and Stalin's purges and then in 1941 invasion by
the Germans. Much of the western part of the empire suffered a brutal enemy
occupation; both Moscow and Leningrad escaped capture, but the unfortunate
citizens of Leningrad were forced to endure a 900-day siege.
Russian forces played the vital role in the defeat of Germany and succeeded
in reaching Berlin in 1945, before the Americans and British. Stalin set about
rebuilding Russia, but his methods were just as drastic and extreme as before the
war. Tensions between the USSR and its former allies in the West increased and
both sides were unwilling to withdraw their troops from Germany. Both suspected
each other’s motives: when Stalin created a Russian 'outer-empire' by extending
Soviet control over the states of eastern Europe, the Cold War was precipitated.
After the death of Stalin in 1953, the next phase was dominated by Nikita
Khrushchev. Under his leadership communism became more civilized; he was
critical of Stalin’s excesses and he tried to modernize and improve the system.
However, though they were not without success, his policies did not please every
body. His agricultural reforms were disappointing and Soviet prestige suffered
a blow with what seemed like defeat in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. In 1964
the Central Committee of the party voted Khrushchev into retirement on the
grounds of ill health. Leonid Brezhnev eventually emerged as the next leader; he
was reluctant to take any initiatives and both industry and agriculture stagnated.
When Mikhail Gorbachev became leader in 1985 he was determined to reform
and modernize the system, though he wanted Russia to remain communist.
At the forefront of his new approach were glasnost (openness) and perestroika
(restructuring). He encouraged criticism of Stalin, claiming that Stalinism was
a distortion of true communism and that he intended to return the regime to the
true path of Lenin. However, as more and more openness was allowed, criticism
of Lenin and the communist party also developed. In the ‘outer-empire’ commun
ism had been largely abandoned by the end of 1989. Many of Gorbachev’s party
colleagues were dismayed by this turn of events and tried to remove him from
power (August 1991). Thanks to Boris Yeltsin, the coup attempt failed and the
communist party was discredited. The USSR began to fall apart as the separate
Soviet republics chose to go their own ways. On Christmas Day 1991 Gorbachev
resigned as President of the USSR, which had ceased to exist.
And so once again Russia was left in chaos: Yeltsin, as President of Russia,
announced a de-communization policy and a rapid move to a capitalist market
Introduction: Russia in the twentieth century 3

economy. But for over 70 years the people of the USSR had lived under the rule of
a highly centralized, one-party dictatorship with a state-controlled command
economy. Communism was a complete way of life that could not simply be jetti
soned overnight. Yeltsin found that the problems of reforming the economy, the
administration and the political system all at the same time were acute. Some
progress had been made by 1999 when he resigned because of ill health, to be
replaced by Vladimir Putin, but there is still a long way to go, and probably many
years, before the transformation will be complete.
1.2 The writing of Russian history

It is not surprising that such a complex and turbulent period of history has given
rise to a whole host of differing interpretations. First of all there was the official
view of Soviet historians that Lenin and the Bolsheviks, steeped in the ‘scientific'
theories of revolutionary Marxism (see section 2.3 for details about Marxist
theories), played the vital role in bringing down the incompetent regime of
Nicholas II. Following this, they ‘made’ the October revolution by galvanizing the
oppressed masses into action. Together they overthrew the Provisional Govern
ment, and then the Bolsheviks proceeded to introduce socialism, the ‘dictator
ship of the proletariat’ - a genuine workers’ state, which rescued Russia from
economic backwardness and political autocracy. The official version of events
emphasized the Marxist view that there was nothing accidental about the October
revolution: it was inevitable as soon as the working classes became strong
enough and organised enough to overthrow the class-based tsarist regime. It was
the ultimate climax of the class struggle, the most important event in world
history so far, and one which, according to the scientific laws of historical develop
ment and progress, was bound to happen. Soviet historians painted as black
a picture of the state of Russia under Nicholas II as they possibly could in order to
make the Soviet achievement appear all the more impressive. In spite,of all the
efforts of Russia’s defeated classes, who waged a treacherous civil war against the
new regime, the workers' state survived. An alternative way of organizing society,
in which ordinary people were in control of their own lives, free from the exploit
ations of capitalism, had been successfully launched. In the Soviet view the
workers’ utopia continued to function successfully, with a few amendments,
under Stalin and Khrushchev and into the 1980s. All Soviet historians had to
stick firmly to this interpretation - it was the way in which the communists
sought to establish the legitimacy of their regime.
What is regarded as the traditional Western liberal view began to take shape
soon after the Second World War, with the beginning of the Cold War. The USSR
and communism were seen, particularly in the USA, as a threat to Western
civilization, and there was an almost obsessive desire to ‘understand the enemy\
Western historians challenged the official Soviet interpretation of events on
almost every point. Both sides agreed that the Tsarist system was incompetent
and Russia backward, and they acknowledged the crucial role of Lenin and
the Bolsheviks in the overthrow of the Provisional Government. But there the
agreement ended. Western liberal historians rejected the Marxist theory of the
4 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rucian History

inevitability of the revolution and the whole idea of 'scientific1laws governing
history. The idea that the entire course of world history was governed by the class
struggle was seen as ridiculous, since there are many other factors at work which
help to determine what happens in any situation. Although a revolution was
likely, given the combination of circumstances in Russia in the early twentieth
century, events could have turned out very differently; for instance, the First World
War might not have broken out, Nicholas II might have been an intelligent and
talented politician, the leaders of the Provisional Government might have been
more politically astute, Lenin and Trotsky could have been prevented from
returning to Russia. This traditional Western view paid very little attention to the
role of the masses; they were just simple people who knew nothing about politics
and had been manipulated by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who exploited the
general chaos. Lenin and his party were strictly disciplined and rigidly organized,
and Lenin himself was utterly ruthless and motivated purely by his lust for
power. The authoritarian nature of Bolshevism led inexorably to a centralized,
one-party state based on violence and terror; Stalinism was simply a continuation
of Leninism, and neither of them did a lot to help the Russian people.
There is a third group of historians - radical left-wingers - who are often
described as libertarians. They include a few Marxists, non-Marxists, anarchists
and some Russian socialist, but anti-Bolshevik writers, who were forced into
exile after the Bolsheviks came to power. They disagree on many of the details,
but there is some consensus on certain basic points. They argue that the pro
duction of wealth breeds economic oppression and humiliation for the workers.
This can only be overcome when the workers themselves are able to organize
and manage production. In the view of libertarian historians the masses were
responsible for both revolutions in Russia in 1917 - there was a genuinely demo
cratic movement in which the Russian people tried to take control over their
own lives. Workers’ factory committees began to be formed after the February
revolution, and before the Bolsheviks seized power. The workers took the slogan
‘all power to the Soviets’ literally and wanted and expected a decentralized
government. Then in October the Bolsheviks hi-jacked their revolution and dis
torted it; control was taken out of the hands of the workers and given to officials
appointed by the state. The masses therefore got the very opposite of what they
had expected - a centralized dictatorship. It was no more than a change of
oppressors; ordinary workers and peasants were just as exploited in the USSR
as they had been under Tsarism.
There have been variations on similar themes from individual writers like Leon
Trotsky who in 1937 published a book with the significant tide The Revolution
Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? His interpretation was
that October 1917 was a genuine workers' revolution and that Lenin had been on
the right road to socialism; he had never wanted to be a dictator - it was Stalin
who had ruined things by introducing the cult of personality and the excessive
use of state terror. This debate about Lenin and Stalin has been a recurring theme:
supporters of the ‘discontinuity’ theory - such as Isaac Deutscher and Adam
Ulam - believe that Stalin destroyed Leninism by making himself a dictator and
introducing a totalitarian state; supporters of ‘continuity1 argue that Leninism
inevitably led on to Stalinism (see section 5.10).

On the other hand a few Western historians took a more sympathetic view of
both Lenin and Stalin. E.H. Carr for example, although he did not approve of the
use of terror, nevertheless argued that Russia was so backward that authoritarian
methods were needed to enable the country to catch up with the West. For him,
the great thing about Lenin and Stalin was that their policies were successful.
‘The pattern of life of ordinary people changed for the better,’ he wrote; ‘the
Soviet worker, and even the Soviet peasant, of 1967 was a very different person
from his father and grandfather in 1917. He could hardly fail to be conscious of
what the revolution had done for him; and this outweighed the absence of
freedoms which he had never enjoyed or dreamed of. The harshness and cruelty
of the regime were real. But so also were its achievements.’1
One of the problems for all non-Russian historians trying to write about the
Soviet period was that they were hampered by the difficulty of finding reliable
documentary evidence and reliable statistics. Stalin made it almost impossible to
get at the truth by throwing a wall of secrecy around the activities of the commun
ist party and the government; only approved information was made available
and this tended to exaggerate the achievements of his regime. Western historians
attempting to work in Soviet libraries and archives were sometimes accused of
spying and expelled from the country.
In the mid-1960s the writing of the history of the revolutionary period entered
a new phase, sometimes referred to as ‘revisionist’ history. This happened partly
as a result of Khrushchev's determination to let some of the truth come out about
the horrors of Stalinism, and partly because of the relaxation of Cold War ten
sions. The Soviet government began to allow Western historians more access to
their archives, though there were still many restrictions, and it was understood
that nothing derogatory must be written about Lenin. All this coincided "with a
further growth of interest in Russian history among American historians. The ‘revi
sionists’ did not agree on every detail, but they all had similar attitudes: they were
prepared to challenge traditional views and refused to allow themselves to be
swayed by the ‘anti-left’ attitudes of most Western historians; they wanted to
investigate the experiences of the mass of ordinary people - their sdcial and
economic problems - to which very little attention had been paid by earlier his
torians. Their conclusions were that social forces had been at least as important
as politics in causing the revolutions. The traditional interpretation was that
political events in Petrograd, the capital, were the driving force behind both rev
olutions; the actions of members of the Duma, the Provisional Government, the
Petrograd Soviet and the Bolshevik party leaders were all-important, and it
seemed, according to this interpretation, that the great mass of ordinary people
made little or no contribution. The ‘revisionists’ revealed that industrial workers,
soldiers and peasants had been extremely active, not just in Petrograd, but in
Moscow and other regions as well. The October revolution in particular was not
simply a political coup in the capital, it was a genuine popular uprising which
had the backing of ordinary people all over the empire. This interpretation
therefore played down the contribution of the Bolsheviks - it was the support of
the masses rather than any special organizational genius on the part of Lenin
that brought the party to power. At the same time some historians began to look
again at the pre-revolutionary period, suggesting that the situation was not as
6 Mastering Twentieth-Century Russian History

bad as Soviet historians would have it. One of the first to do so was Alexander
Gershenkron who, in 1962, concluded that ‘it seems plausible to say that Russia
on the eve of the [First World] war was well on the way towards a westernization
or, perhaps more precisely, a Germanization of its industrial growth.’2
Yet another change took place during Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) era when
people were allowed much greater freedom to speak out about their experiences
under Stalin. Russian historians were encouraged to be critical of Stalin; text
books of Soviet history were withdrawn and history examinations cancelled until
the rethink was completed. Horrifying details soon emerged about the excesses
and atrocities committed during Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture and his
purges. In 1990 General Dmitri Volkogonov produced a highly critical biography
of Stalin which would not have been allowed before Gorbachev's time. But criti
cism also spread to Lenin who came under fire for his ruthlessness during the
civil war and his rejection of democracy.
After the collapse of the USSR and the communist party there was a dramatic
change in the historiography of the revolution and the Soviet period. Yeltsin
threw open all the archives; from 1991 until 1993 Volkogonov was in charge of the
declassification of communist party and state documents and he was respon
sible for releasing seventy eight million files. As Sheila Fitzpatrick points out, ‘for
historians, particularly historians of the Soviet period, this was a bonanza
comparable with the opening of Nazi-period records in Germany after the col
lapse of the Third Reich.’3 Much new information came out, especially about the
activities of Lenin and Stalin, the terror and the purges of the 1930s, and about
the great famine of 1932-33. Also available were secret police reports and docu
ments belonging to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the
Politburo. There was a flood of books and articles on various aspects of the
revolutionary period.
The new freedom for historians had several important results. First of all it led
to the complete discrediting of the traditional Soviet account. Volkogonov
himself published a devastating biography of Trotsky (1992), and an equally
hostile one of Lenin followed in 1994. Correspondingly, Russian writers went into
raptures about the Tsarist regime, so much so that Professor Paul Dukes of the
University of Aberdeen, who took part in an international historians’ conference
in Russia in April 1993, had this to say: ‘There is some danger at the present time of
looking at the Tsarist empire of Nicholas n as a kind of “Merrie Russia”, a won
derful dream ruined by the Revolution and the ensuing Soviet nightmare. During
one of the recesses of the conference, one of the younger Russian participants
expressed his firm belief in the sainthood of Nicholas II and the return of absolutist
Tsarism by Divine Right as the only hope for his country’s future.’4
Another result of the new openness was to provide what seemed to be fresh
authenticity to the traditional Western view. If the Soviet interpretation of events
had been wrong all along, it suggested that those historians who had been most
critical of it - traditional Westerners - might have been right. Richard Pipes, the
veteran Professor of History at Harvard University, and a long-time traditionalist,
brought out The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 (1990) and Russia under the
Bolshevik Regime 1919-1924 (1993), in which he completely disregarded the work
of the revisionists and restated the traditional Western interpretation. He took

a strongly anti-Bolshevik and anti-Lenin view and ignored the revisionists’
emphasis on the widespread working-class support for the October revolution.
For Pipes,'there was nothing inevitable about the revolution, and it was not the
product of a genuine mass movement - it was simply an opportunist seizure of
power by the Bolsheviks. There never was a workers’ state; what Lenin did, motiv
ated purely by his lust for power, was to bring in a totalitarian system, very like
the old tsarist autocracy, except that there was a different group of people in
control.
It has to be said that most Western historians disagree with the Pipes inter
pretation of events. Edward Acton, Professor of Modem European History at the
University of East Anglia, is completely dismissive: he claims that each one of
Pipes’s propositions ’flies in the face of the most detailed and meticulous specialist
research; the overall picture painted is a mere caricature of the momentous
social drama which that research is gradually recovering. It is as if, because the
collapse of the USSR took place when the right was riding high in the West, a veil
was about to be drawn over the implications of the best work of recent decades
in an attempt to ensure that popular understanding of the revolution would be
based on old myths resuscitated.’5 The latest research attaches even more
importance to the actions of ordinary people. As Christopher Read puts it in his
book From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and their Revolution, 1917-21
(1996), ‘in the Russian Empire, the revolution was constantly driven forward by
the often spontaneous impulse given to it from the grass roots. In the course of
their struggle peasants, workers and, perhaps most important in the short term,
soldiers and sailors thought out their programmes and developed tactics to
achieve them locally and regionally.'6
The research of many historians of the younger generation, including Russians,
Americans and Europeans, has taken off in yet new directions. Often described
as ‘post-modernists’, these historians are much less interested in Marxism, in
concepts of class and in social concerns than were earlier historians; they tend to
focus on areas such as ideas, culture and nationality. Their approach h^s a tend
ency to treat all interpretations of the past as determined by the cultural position
of the historian in the present. In one sense this brings them into conflict with
the revisionists and their interest in the social and economic aspirations of the
working class. It is probably on the Stalinist era that their work has had the
greatest impact; some of them, for example, seek to emphasize the ‘paternalistic’
aspects of Stalinism7 (see section 6.6).
During the last century, so many unexpected events have happened in Russia,
so many controversial changes have taken place, and the Russian people have
undergone such terrible traumas, that it is no wonder there is such a wide variety
of interpretations. But this is what makes Russian history so fascinating, and this
book, which makes use of the most recent research by leading scholars of Rus
sian history, is designed to make it as accessible as possible. Each chapter begins
with a short summary of events and a brief mention of the main areas of debate,
and then goes on to examine what happened and to discuss the different views in
detail. I have tried to steer a comprehensible course through the rich but
bewildering variety of interpretations and to present a balanced and objective
account of what happened and why. At the end of each chapter there is a selection
8 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rupiah History

of documentary evidence relating to some of the areas of debate; this can be used
as a basis for discussion or simply read for sheer enjoyment!
Notes
1. E.H. Carr, The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin, 1917-1929, pp. 188-9.
2. A. Gerschenkron, 'Agrarian Policies and Industrialisation: Russia, 1861-1917', The
Cambridge History o f Europe, vol. 6, part 2, p. 209.
3. Sheila Fitzpatrick (editor), Stalinism: New Directions, p. 1.
4. Paul Dukes, ‘From Soviet to Russian History’, History Today, vol. 43, August 1993.
5. Edward Acton, 'The Revolution and its Historians’, in Acton, Chemiaev and Rosenberg
(editors), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914-1921, p. 13.
6. Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and their Revolution, 1917-21,
p.5.
7. See for example Lewis H. Siegelbaum, 'Socialist Paternalism and Soviet rural “notables” in
the mid-1930s\ in S. Fitzpatrick (editor), Stalinism: New Directions, pp. 231-55.
IS 2 Russia before the First W o rld W a r
Summary of events
The Russian Empire in 1900 covered an enormous area stretching from its
frontiers with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the west, across eastern Europe
and Asia to the Pacific Coast, a distance of over five thousand miles; from
Murmansk in the Arctic north down to the frontier with Turkey the distance is
about two thousand miles, making Russia by far the largest state in the world in
area. It also had the largest population - estimated at around 132 million. However,
this vast empire was not stable: although regarded as one of the great powers,
Russia had not kept up with the world’s leading nations - the USA, Germany
and Britain - in industrial development, in social progress or in progress
towards democracy.
Since 1613 Russia had been ruled by members of the Romanov dynasty who
were absolute autocratic monarchs; there was no elected parliament to act as
a check on their exercise of power, there were no legal political parties and
there was no long tradition of regional or town local government. A strict press
censorship was in operation.
The last three Tsars were:

\
Alexander II (1855-81) A man of some vision, he was prepared to contemplate
reforms, and was responsible for the emancipation of
the serfs in 1861. He was assassinated in 1881.
Alexander III (1881-94) Turned firmly against all further reform and presided
over a period of total reaction.
Nicholas II (1894-1917) Continued the policy of reaction until the 1905 revolu
tion, when he was forced to make some concessions.
Although both Nicholas and Alexander III realised the need for, and encouraged
industrial progress, they were both reluctant to give up any of their power, and
were devoted to preserving the autocracy intact. They both lacked the vision to
cope with the modernization of their vast country.
1904-05 - War with Japan. The government made the mistake of becoming
involved in war with Japan, expecting an easy victory. However, it ended in
humiliating defeat for Russia.

The 1905 Revolution. There was a long revolutionary tradition in Russia; in spite
of political parties being illegal, there were a number of groups which functioned
‘underground' - Populists, Socialist Revolutionaries and Marxists. There was
unrest among industrial workers and peasants and in 1905, in the middle of the
war with Japan, disturbances broke out which soon spread to most parts of the
empire, and became serious enough to be called a revolution. Nicholas was
forced to issue the October Manifesto in which he made some concessions: he
allowed an elected national parliament, the Duma, and legalized political parties
and trade unions. A number of political parties, which had been active in secret,
were now able to function openly.
The Duma experiment fails. Although the October Manifesto seemed to promise
progress towards democracy, Nicholas himself was determined to ignore the Duma
as much as possible, though some of his ministers, notably Petr Stolypin, tried to
co-operate with it. Between 1907 and 1917 there were four Dumas, but for a number
of reasons, the Tsar and the Duma failed to develop a harmonious relationship.
Economic progress. Great progress was made in industry and agriculture in the
years up to 1914, though there is great discussion among historians about exactly
how successful these programmes were, and about whether the Tsarist regime
was likely to have survived, had it not been for the First World War.
Main areas of debate:
• How active were the masses politically?

• How successful were the modernization programmes in industry and
agriculture and could Russia really be regarded as a 'modem’state in 1914?
• Was there a real chance of democracy developing?
• Was revolution already inevitable in 1914 or could Tsarism have survived?
2.1 Russian government and society before 1905

(a) Alexander II (1855-81) and his reforms
During the first half of the nineteenth century there were rigid class divisions:
about one per cent of the people were aristocrats or nobles, 90 per cent were
peasants, and the remainder consisted of townspeople, industrial workers and
middle classes. Until 1861 the majority of peasants were serfs, owned by their
aristocratic landlords; they were not allowed to own land; although most were
allowed to farm a small area for their own use, this remained the property of the
landlord; and they were not allowed to leave their villages. The Tsar Alexander II
introduced some important reforms in the hope of revitalizing and stimulating
Russia before the First W orld W ar I

the country and the economy, after Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean
War (1854-56). However, he did not want to change the basic political framework,
which he was determined must remain an autocracy.
The most important reform was the abolition of serfdom inl861 which meant
that peasants were now free and were allotted a portion of land taken from their
landlord. The state paid landlords compensation for land given to peasants, but
peasants were expected to repay the state in instalments - known as redemption
payments - over 49 years. The mir or village commune held this peasant land in
collective ownership, and was responsible for making sure redemption payments
were made. In local government new elected provincial and district assemblies
known as zemstua were introduced in 1864 in the European part of the empire.
Each zemstvo was allowed to raise local taxes and was given some responsibility
for education, health, prisons, transport and roads, credit and insurance, famine
relief and general care of the poor. Where appropriate, zemstua were expected to
encourage industry and new fhethods of agriculture. The voting system for elec
tions to the district zemstua was based on class divisions: nobles, townspeople
and peasants each voted for their own representatives in a separate electoral
college, which ensured that the nobles always had a majority in every zemstvo.
Members took their responsibilities seriously and the zemstua soon began to
employ large numbers of teachers, doctors, nurses and other experts. Cides and
large towns were allowed to have elected municipal councils (1874) though again
the right to vote depended on a property qualification. Another important
reform was the remodelling of the legal system along Western lines, with the
introduction of public trial by jury, and elected justices of the peace to deal with
minor cases. Universities were given more control over their own affairs, and
there was some relaxation of the strict press censorship. The army, which had
not distinguished itself during the Crimean War, also underwent some modern
ization - universal conscription was introduced and attempts were made to build
up a more efficient and professional officer corps. In the late 1870s some of Alex
ander’s ministers proposed that he should take steps to set up some sort of
mechanism for him to consult representatives of the zemstua and the municipal
councils.
Tragically the Tsar Liberator, as Alexander became known, was killed by a
terrorist bomb in 1881, on the very day that he had apparently decided to accept
some of the proposals. His son and successor, Alexander III (1881-94), instead of
drawing the conclusion that further reform was needed to make the regime
popular, decided that reform had gone too far, and introduced a package of mea
sures known as ‘the Reaction’ to tighten up government control and put a stop to
any further moves towards democracy in both central and local government. The
powers of the secret police (the Okhrana) were increased, the reformist ministers
who had suggested ‘consultation’ to Alexander II were dismissed and any judges
and magistrates who were thought to be too ‘reformist’ or too liberal were
sacked. The zemstua lost many of their powers and could be overruled by govern
ment officials known as land captains, who were appointed by provincial gover
nors. Land captains were mostly nobles and were given wide powers over the
peasants. This repressive policy was continued by Nicholas II until the 1905
revolution.1

(b) Society according to the 1897 census
The first census ever held in Russia - in 1897 - gave a total population for the
empire of 126 million, of which 92 million lived in the European part. The census
also showed that class divisions were still very much alive:
Ruling class (Tsar, court and government) 0.5%

Upper class (nobles, higher clergy, army and navy officers) 12.0%
Middle class (merchants, factory owners, financiers, teachers) 1.5%
Working class (factory workers, miners, small shopkeepers) 4.0%
Peasants 82.0%
It was an overwhelmingly rural society: only 15 per cent of the population lived in
cities or large towns; 75 per cent of all working people were employed in agricul
ture, while only 9 per cent worked in mining and other industries. By 1914 this
figure had increased to 10 per cent and the total population had also increased to
155 million of whom 18 per cent now lived in urban areas. The population of the
few big cities increased sharply during those 17 years: St Petersburg (the imperial
capital) grew from 1.25 million to 2.12 million, Moscow from roughly one million
to 1.76 million, Warsaw from 0.68 million to about one million, and both Riga
and Kiev from 250,000 to 500,000 each.2 These figures alone suggest that some
substantial industrial expansion must have taken place. It has to be remembered,
however, that all Russian statistics are unreliable and have to be taken as approxi
mate; some estimates put the total population of the empire in 1914 as high as
170 million; a margin of error of 15 million tells us a lot about the reliability and
efficiency of the Russian bureaucracy during these years.
(c) The elite nobles and the government

The royal family and a relatively small group of noble families who were immensely
rich and influential formed an elite class which more or less ran the country. The
Romanovs took their advisers from these leading families who also provided top
army personnel. They were a closely knit group bound together by intermarriage,
political activity, service of the state, and culture. Even at the beginning of the
twentieth century the elite still dominated the court and the government. The
basic principle on which government was carried out was autocracy - personal
rule by the Tsar, who was God’s representative on earth, at least as far as the
Russian empire was concerned. It was the Tsar's right and his duty to rule the
country completely without constraint from laws, ministers, bureaucracy or par
liaments - his decision was final on all matters. Both Alexander III and Nicholas II
were encouraged to uphold this principle by conservative advisers like
Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the man responsible for persuading Alexander III to
introduce his anti-reform policy. The elite was therefore split into two camps. On
the one hand were the reformists, who deplored the limitations placed on local
government bodies and argued that the problems of modem government were
far too complex for one man to cope with almost alone. Many of the officials and
civil servants in the Ministry of Finance were reformists since they were expected
Russia before the First W orld W ar 13

14
Mastering T w en tie th -C e n tu ry Russian H istory
Figure 2.1 Extremes o f wealth and poverty: a dinner party in the palace o f Countess Shuvalov, in St Petersburg.
Russia before th e First W o r ld W a r
Figure 2.2 Extremes o f wealth and poverty: a soup kitchen fo r the poor and unemployed in St Petersburg.
15
to transform the country industrially and yet were hampered by all the obstacles
in the way of middle class initiatives and enterprise. They thought it was vital to
involve the'educated public in some way in government, at the very least in a
consultative role. Sergei Witte, the successful Transport and Finance Minister in
the 1890s (see section 2.5(a)) was convinced that revolution could only be avoided
if Russia was transformed into a fully modern society. On the other hand there
were the reactionaries, always numerous in the Ministry of the Interior, which
was responsible for keeping law and order. Reactionaries believed that a police
state was the best way of keeping the country under control, and they were in the
ascendancy under Alexander III and Nicholas II right up until 1905. Nearly all
Nicholas II’s ministers of foreign and internal affairs, even after 1905, came from
old elite noble families.
Government was therefore centralized in the person of the Tsar, who acted
through his Council of Ministers, the police, the Okhrana and his agents. The
principle was the same in local government where every attempt was made to
curtail the powers of the zemstva in favour of the nobles. The Tsar also had other
groups of advisers such as the State Council, some of whose members were
elected by the zemstva; however, the council was always dominated by reaction
ary nobles. Any suggestions that a national zemstvo should be called were dis
missed out of hand, and all political parties were banned. This then was what
government in Russia amounted to in the years before 1905.
(d) Nobility
These were the traditional landowning class; in 1861 there were about 128,000
noble families who held land. The majority of landowning families were not
members of the elite, and had gone through a difficult period after the abolition
of serfdom in 1861. They had lost their cheap serf labour and had to pay wages,
which left many of them struggling to make their estates viable. Some decided to
sell up and move into the city, and by 1905 the number of landowningNfamilies
had fallen to about 107,000. After the 1905 revolution many more followed suit
and joined one or other of the expanding professional groups, such as university
lecturers and lawyers, or went into business - industry, commerce and transport.
Many put their capital in shares and bonds or invested successfully in urban
property. By 1912 the amount of land owned by nobles had fallen to only half the
amount owned by them in 1861. Not surprisingly there was resentment among
many nobles at the loss of their privileged position. Around the turn of the cen
tury they began to turn to politics; they accused the government of favouring
industry at their expense and even ventured to demand reform of the autocracy.
They became involved in the work of the zemstva and used them as a platform
from which to publicize their ideas. The more radical of them formed links with
the liberal intelligentsia in the cities (see section 2.2(g)), and played an important
role in the development of the 1905 revolution.
Not all nobles fell on hard times, however; those with initiative and drive tried
to turn their estates into profitable enterprises; they were willing to invest and
introduce the latest agricultural methods, and some became successful capital
ists, buying up land cheaply from struggling neighbours. One of the best known

of these 'farmer' nobles was Prince G.E. Lvov, who was for a short time the first
Prime Minister of the Provisional Government after the collapse of the mon
archy. They were the sort of liberal aristocrats who were genuinely concerned
about the problems and difficulties faced by the peasants and who were anxious
to improve their conditions. They could foresee trouble if nothing was done.
Unfortunately, the more conservative nobles resented these liberal tendencies
and did their best to block attempts at reform.
The nobility also included top members of the government bureaucracy or
civil service and army officers. With the great expansion of the bureaucracy and
the army in the last quarter of the nineteenth century there was a corresponding
increase in the numbers of people from wider social backgrounds receiving
noble status. Between 1875 and 1895, for instance, 37,000 people acquired heredi
tary noble status.3 Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, had become a heredi
tary noble and a state councillor in 1874 on his appointment as Director of
Popular Schools in Simbirsk province. The bureaucracy was gradually becoming
more professional and after 1905 the political influence of the nobles increased.
For the first time they were allowed to form an organisation - the United Nobility,
many of its members were elected to the State Council and the State Duma as
members of the Octobrist Party (those who accepted the October Manifesto).
Unfortunately the reactionary/reformist split continued: reactionary nobles blocked
proposals for further reform, especially some of those proposed by Petr Stolypin
(see section 2.6(b)), while the reformists became increasingly frustrated with and
resentful of the incompetent and anachronistic police state.
(e) Middle classes

This was a tiny group according to the 1897 census and it was still weak even in
1914 after the industrial progress of the previous two decades. It included the
leaders and organisers of industry and trade - factory and mine owners, mer
chants, bankers and financiers. Some industrialists, like the Putilovs, who owned
steelworks in St Petersburg, and the Morozovs, who were in textiles and railway
building, were extremely wealthy; the Putilovs employed 54,000 workers by 1914.
There were tensions within the business community arising from the fact that
Russia's industrialization was carried out with state supervision and intervention
and with a great deal of foreign investment. Industrialists who won government
contracts were resented by those who did not. The younger generation of busi
nessmen, especially in Moscow, were critical of the conservatism of their elders
and wanted to get involved in politics to agitate for a more efficient govern
mental system. And yet at the same time they needed a strong authoritarian state
to help them clamp down on labour unrest. In the early years of the century
these entrepreneurs were only just beginning to acquire the status of their coun
terparts in western Europe, and had nothing like their political influence. The
government, nervous of any group which might threaten its autocratic control,
kept a close eye on the activities of their professional associations for signs of
criticism or subversion. Strangely perhaps, industrialists and financiers made
very little contact with nobles, either socially or politically. As Peter Gatrell points
out, 'close contact between a member of the Russian landed nobility and an
Russia before the First World W ar 17

industrialist or banker brought shame and even scandal on the former's family.’4
But if they lacked political influence, many of them made a significant contribu
tion to the cultural life of the country. This was a period of great cultural revival
and vitality in which, in some ways, Russia led the rest of Europe (see section
2.1 (k)). Many businessmen were patrons of the arts, helping to finance musicians
and the theatre, and building up art collections.
Also part of the middle class were the intelligentsia, though even at the time there
was a great debate in Russia about exactly what this term meant and who could
claim to be a member of the intelligentsia. It was not simply that every educated
person was an intelligent; it came to be accepted, especially after the 1905 revo
lution, at least among the intelligentsia themselves, that they were the people who
held the key to progress - and that lay in mounting a challenge to the whole basis of
autocracy. The intelligentsia included doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, man
agers, writers and artists, and in fact any educated person who felt impatient with
the government’s policy of reaction, and who were convinced that society and
politics must be changed. Many became active in one or other of the secret political
groups (see section 2.2). The earliest intellectuals were nobles, but later, as educa
tion became more widespread, they were joined by people from a wider social
background. They prided themselves on being non-estate and classless.
(f ) Working classes
By 1913 this rapidly growing class had reached about 2.4 million workers in large-
scale industry, plus another 8.4 million in small-scale enterprises, building, trans
port, communications and domestic service.5 Many of the industrial workers
were peasants who had moved to take jobs in towns, in metal and textile factories
and in the transport system. They tended to retain their links with their rural area
and often went back to their village to help with the harvest; many still kept
a small plot of land which was looked after by relatives and which would be very
useful whenever there was a slump or a strike. Living and working conditions
were primitive (see section 2.3(b)) for more details). There was an elite group of
skilled workers or master craftsmen who were better paid than ordinary labourers.
They sometimes organized themselves into a sort of co-operative called an artel.
As education spread, more workers became literate and were receptive to revo
lutionary literature. However, trade unions were illegal in 1900; the only forms of
workers’ organizations allowed were those sponsored by the authorities and
closely supervised by the police. Industrial workers were therefore completely at
the mercy of their employers and of economic fluctuations. In the years after
1900 for example, a world trade depression brought unemployment and wage
reductions to Russian workers. By 1905 unrest was so great that even their weak
trade unions were determined to challenge the government (see section 2.3(a-c)).
After the 1905 revolution unions were legalized and quickly spread; they attracted
mainly young, skilled workers in small craft-based industries, though they were
not so popular among workers in large-scale industry. By January 1907 union
membership had reached 250,000, but in June of that year the government again
banned unions and other forms of labour organization (see section 2.6(b)).
Although later a few trade unions were allowed, the movement remained extremely

weak right up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Nevertheless, urban
workers were extremely militant and strikes were common, even though they
were illegal.
(g) Peasants
At the turn of the century about 82 per cent of the population were classified as
belonging to the peasantry. Serfs belonging to private landowners had been
given their personal freedom by the Emancipation Edict of 1861, but state-
owned serfs had to wait until 1886 before they were allowed full rights. On the
whole peasants were disappointed at the results of emancipation and they
seemed to be no better off materially. In the fertile Black-Earth area (a huge
swathe of land stretching from the border with Romania, through the Ukraine,
Central Russia and on to the Ural mountains) peasants actually came out of it
with about 25 per cent less land than they had been allowed to farm for their own
use before, because the landowners wanted to take as much of this rich land as
they could get their hands on. Landlords were able to do this because of a rule
that if, after the handing over of the peasant allotments, a landlord would be left
with less than half his estate, he could reduce the size of the peasant allotments.
It was generally felt that landowners had been left in possession of far too much
land, and peasants bitterly resented the redemption payments. They still had to
do military service, they were forbidden to leave their village without the permis
sion of the village commune and they were liable to be publicly flogged (this was
abolished in 1904).
And yet the picture was not all bad: the peasants had something which was
unique to Russia - the village commune or mir. These varied in size from as few
as half a dozen households to as many as a thousand; at the turn of the century
the average was about 54 households and 290 people. Each commune elected
elders and a tax collector, and together with the village assembly, they ran the life
of the commune. Most of the village land was jointly owned and from time to
time the commune would redistribute the land so that everybody got a share of
the best and the households stayed relatively equal. At the same time a larger
proportion of peasants was able to read: literacy increased from 21 per cent of
the total population of the empire in 1897 to 40 per cent in 1914; among the peas
ants it was especially high in areas closest to big cities - 90 per cent of peasant
recruits into the army from St Petersburg and Moscow provinces were literate in
1904. It is no surprise that many revolutionary activists emerged from the ranks
of the peasants; in 1917 they were just as ready to take land by force as they had
been in 1905-06.
The nature and characteristics of the peasantry have been the subject of some
debate, and a number of myths have been perpetuated. Soviet historians divided
the peasants into two mutually hostile groups: ordinary and poor peasants on
one hand, and better-off peasants, called kulaks, who were portrayed as enemies
of socialism, on the other. Recent research suggests that this is far too simplistic
an interpretation; obviously some peasants would be more successful than others,
but there was probably never a clear-cut division between the two classes; and
anyway the situation varied from region to region. Another assumption made by

many historians was that the peasants were ignorant, had no understanding of
politics, had no ideas about how they would like to organize their lives and were
only capable of destructive violence. But it is now clear that the peasants did
have ideas about what revolution meant: for them it meant land and freedom.
The land should belong to those who cultivated it, and freedom meant the right
of the peasant commune to run their own affairs free from interference by the
government, the nobles and the Church. And thirdly there was the debate about
whether the peasant economy was in crisis in the early years of the twentieth
century. Some historians argue that the peasants were becoming increasingly
impoverished because of the rapidly growing population: one estimate is that
there was a 20 per cent increase in the rural population of the empire between
1900 and 1914.6 The small size of peasant holdings and old-fashioned farming
methods - separate strips and wooden ploughs pulled by horses - meant that
food production barely kept up with the population increase. In 1891-92 there
was a disastrous famine in the middle Volga region in which 400,000 people
died.7 Some more recent revisionist research suggests that there was no real
crisis in agriculture, that peasant productivity was improving, that their spending
power was increasing and that this was reflected in the rise in government
receipts from indirect taxation. Increasing food production was keeping pace
with the growing population.8 The truth no doubt lies somewhere between the
two - conditions varied according to area: the most successful peasants were
probably those in southern Russia, around the northern shores of the Black Sea;
in the Black Earth zone conditions for many peasants were worsening (see section
2.4(b) for more on the state of the peasants).
(h) Nationalities
The Russian empire was a great multi-national conglomeration with many
different languages, religions and cultures. At the time of the 1897 census the
Russians themselves made up less than half the total population - 55.6 million out
of 126 million. The next largest national groups were Ukrainians with 22.4 million
and Poles with 7.9 million. Then came White Russians (in Belorussia) with
5.8 million, Kirgiz (4 million), Tatars (3.4 million), Finns (3.1 million) and Germans
(1.8 million). Other small groups included Latvians, Bashkirs, Lithuanians,
Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Chechens, Romanians, Estonians, Mordvinians, Geor
gians, Tajiks, Turkmenians, Greeks and Bulgarians. In addition there were about
5 million Jews. The other main religious groups were Orthodox Christians (70 per
cent of the population), Roman Catholics (9 per cent) and Muslims (11 per cent).
The Tsarist regime had no sympathy with any non-Russians who showed the
slightest desire for a separate cultural and political identity. They carried out
a strict 'Russification' policy which aimed to turn the non-Russians into ‘true
Christians, loyal subjects, and good Russians’; their supporters extolled the
special virtues of the Slav peoples. After 1881, all non-Russian languages were
banned from schools, official documents and street signs. Jews, who were
blamed for the murder of Alexander II in 1881, came in for especially harsh treat
ment: they were not allowed to own land, work in the Civil Service or become
army officers. Consequently both Jews and non-Russians played an important

Map 2.1 Western Russia about 1900.
role in the anti-tsarist parties which were developing around the turn of the
century. The irony was that the majority of the Russians themselves seemed to
have very little sense of nationalism or patriotism. The peasants resented any
influence from outside the commune and the government did nothing to encour
age them out of isolation or to develop a sense of citizenship.

(i) The church
A survey of Russian society would not be complete without mention of the Russian
Orthodox Church which played a large part in everybody’s life. It is impossible to
say what proportion of the Russian people were genuine Christians, but certainly
most of them observed the church rituals with its icons, saints’ days and proces
sions. The church taught unquestioning loyalty to the Tsar who was presented as
the vicar of God; disobedience to him was condemned as a sin. Obviously this
was an important prop for the autocracy which rewarded the church by making
it the official Russian religion - the Established Church. Roman Catholics, most
of whom were in Poland, and Jews were allowed to practise their religions, but
only members of the Orthodox Church were considered to be true Russians.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century a radical wing developed in the
church which ventured to criticise the regime and disapproved of the close con
nection between church and state. Some priests were elected to the Duma after
1905, but the church leadership remained strongly supportive of the Tsar. The
collapse of the monarchy in 1917 was accompanied by a wave of anti-clericalism
and the church lost all its lands.
(j) The military

The Russian army was seen as the most important prop of the autocracy; soldiers
took an oath of allegiance not to the state, but to the Tsar in person. Gradually,
however, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of
the twentieth, the army became increasingly demoralized. This was to some
extent because of its poor military performances: it suffered defeat in the
Crimean War (1854-56), and it made heavy weather of its short, though victorious
campaign against Turkey (1877-78). Attempts to modernize the army and make
it more professional seemed to meet with little success, and military expenditure
was actually reduced so that more could be spent on modernizing industry.
There was a further humiliating defeat in the war against Japan (1904-5). Another
cause of demoralization was the fact that troops were constantly being used to
suppress unrest - between 1883 and 1903 troops were called out to quell disturb
ances almost 1500 times.
So both officers and men had grounds for complaint; officers felt that the army
should not be used for what they saw as ‘police work’, and they bitterly resented
being expected to fight a war 6000 miles away against Japan, without proper
training and preparation. The most outspoken criticism of the government came
from the younger generation of non-aristocratic officers who were a product of
Alexander II*s army reforms. By 1905 almost half the officers came from non-noble
backgrounds and were mostly in the infantry, whereas the nobles served in Guards
regiments, where they were much better paid and enjoyed a glamorous social
life. The non-nobles deplored the old-fashioned thinking of the aristocrats at the
top who continued to treat the cavalry as the most important branch of the army,
instead of concentrating on motorized transport, machine-guns and heavy artillery.
The vast majority of ordinary rank-and-file soldiers were peasants who
resented the brutal treatment with which they were expected to cope as a matter
22 Mastering Twentieth-Century Ruî^n History

of course. According to Orlando Figes, ‘soldiers could expect to be punched in
the face, hit in the mouth with the butt of a rifle and sometimes even flogged for
relatively minor misdemeanours... even whilst off duty the common soldier
was deprived of the rights of a normal citizen. He could not go to restaurants or
theatres, ride in trams or occupy a seat in a first- or second-class railway
carriage/9 Already during the 1905 revolution some units mutinied when they
were ordered to fire on their fellow peasants. The autocracy was gradually losing
control of its most powerful mainstay.10
(k) Culture and the arts

Russia was certainly not backward in its contribution towards European culture.
The final years of the nineteenth century and the period up to 1917 saw a great
cultural revival after a quiet period following the deaths of writers such as
Turgenev (1883) and Dostoevsky (1881). Tolstoy bridged the gap between the
golden age of Russian literature and the so-called Silver Age: his great novels War
and Peace and Anna Karenina appeared in 1869 and 1876; his later works of
fiction such as the short stories Master and Man (1895) and The Death of Ivan
Ilich (1886), and his novel Resurrection (1889), were written after Tolstoy had
undergone a spiritual crisis, and were concerned with his new moral convictions -
belief in God, renunciation of property, condemnation of violence and the aboli
tion of governments and churches. He was especially outraged by the violence
used by the regime in 1905. Many of his works were banned by the censor, and he
was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church in 1901; but this also made him a
cult figure, and his funeral in 1910 turned into a huge anti-government demon
stration. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), whose grandfather had been a serf, had his
plays The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters produced at the Moscow Arts
Theatre, founded by the great director Stanislavsky in 1898. Later Chekhov
became recognized as one of the first leading exponents of the modem short
story. The realist works of Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) were concerned with the
effects of poverty on people’s lives; in the early years of the twentieth century
he helped the Bolsheviks with financial contributions. There were wonderful
poets too: the symbolist Alexander Blok (1880-1921) and the futurist Vladimir
Mayakovsky (1897-1930). There was a special quality about Russian literature; in
a country where censorship made it impossible to write directly about politics,
novels, poems and literary journals were the alternative way of spreading social
and political ideas.
There was a move towards realism in the world of painting, the best known
artist being I.Y. Repin (1844-1930); but by the turn of the century there was
a reaction against realism and naturalism. Attention was focused on St Petersburg
which could claim to be the world centre of progressive art. Probably the best
remembered Russian artist from this period is Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944),
the man credited with having produced the first abstract painting. Other
modernist Russian artists included Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910), Mikhail Larionov
(1881-1964), and the designer Alexander Benois (1870-1960). The World of Art
Group was founded in St Petersburg in 1898. Another area in which Russia could
claim to be in front of the rest of Europe was ballet - in 1909 Diaghilev founded

the Ballets Russes, which boasted stars like Nijinsky and Pavlova. For some of the
ballets, Diaghilev used music by the rising young composer Igor Stravinsky
(1882-1971) -scores such as The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and TheRiteof
Spring which caused a riot at its first performance in Paris in 1913, and which is
thought by many experts to be the beginning of the modernist movement in
music. Another innovative young composer who was starting to make his mark
on the eve of the First World War was Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953).
Clearly Russian society was full of the greatest contrasts imaginable - from
the glittering and cultured aristocratic circles and salons of St Petersburg all the
way through to the minimal living conditions of the poorest urban workers and
the village peasants. But in all areas of activity there were moves towards
modernization, which meant the emergence of new groups and new classes,
more widespread education and greater awareness of the shortcomings of the
governmental and administrative systems. The one important area which
seemed to be set against its own modernization, even after the warnings of
1905, was the ruling elite, and that was to be the source of the most serious
tensions in Russian society.
2.2 Revolutionary ideas and parties

There was a long revolutionary tradition in Russia which manifested itself
spectacularly from time to time. For example the Decembrists were a group of
progressive army officers who, in December 1825, attempted a coup against the
Tsar Nicholas I in the hope of bringing about some reform of the autocracy.
The coup failed; five of the leaders were hanged and some 200 others were exiled
to Siberia. Later they were regarded as heroes and martyrs by the revolutionaries
of the early twentieth century. In the early years of Alexander II’s reign a group
who became known as Nihilists gained a lot of publicity. They advocated the
total rejection of all existing institutions and moral values, and the necessity of
unrestricted individual freedom, which they saw as the only way to improve the
lot of the Russian people. Thanks to the attentions of right-wing journalists, they
came to be regarded as something of a lunatic fringe. Even with Alexander’s
partial relaxation of the strict press censorship, it was still not easy to spread
revolutionary ideas. Political parties were still banned and the tsarist secret
police were quick to arrest anybody suspected of being involved in a political
movement. Any attempts to organize opposition had to be carried out in secret
and political pamphlets had to be circulated privately to avoid falling foul of the
censor. Russian radical and revolutionary thought was a complex business, and
there were several different strands.
(a) Slavophiles and W esterners

In the mid-nineteenth century a great debate developed about what Russia’s
future should be; the question was: should she follow Britain (and later Germany
and the USA) which had industrialized? There were two general theories.
24 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rüfesiàn History

TTie Westerners thought that Russia should try and catch up with the industrial
ized states of the West and forget that in the past she had been more of an Asiatic
country than a European one. Russia must take on Western culture, technology
and economic ideas - only in that way could she become a great modem power.
This had been in the mind of the Tsar Peter the Great (1695-1725) when he built
his new capital at St Petersburg, which he called his ‘window on the West’.
In opposition to these ideas, the Slavophiles believed that on no account
should Russia try to copy the West. They were not impressed by the industrial
cities of the West which they saw as decadent and degrading to the workers. They
felt that Russia should concentrate on developing her own special attributes.
Chief among these were the peasants with their village communes - this was the
foundation on which the future of Russia must be built.
(b) Populists
One strand of Slavophile thought developed into Populism which attracted the
support of many radical intellectuals during the 1860s and through to the early
1880s. Populists (Narodniki) were agrarian socialists, opposed to capitalism
which was responsible for the industrialization of the West. They believed that
capitalist industrialization had destroyed traditional rural communities by for
cing peasants to become industrial labourers, exploited by their capitalist mas
ters. They wanted to preserve the Russian peasants' village commune which,
they believed, embodied the principle of equality, and which would become the
basis of a future socialist state. Populists disagreed about how this would be
achieved - some favoured peaceful methods, others believed that the only way
was to overthrow the existing regime, by revolution.
The moderates, who included people like Peter Lavrov, wanted a process of
gradual change by evolution. They relied on propaganda to educate the peasants
about their role and seemed to think that the necessary changes would
eventually happen by a process of irresistible logic, when the peasants were
ready. Once the network of communes had been achieved, there would be no
need of centralized control; the state would ‘wither away'.
The more extreme populists wanted something much more decisive - revolu
tion as soon as possible. Nikolai Chemyshevsky (1828-89) put forward his ideas
in the novel What is to be Done? (1862) which tells the story of a group of socialist
activists whose leader is portrayed as a pure and noble hero: he rejects the usual
pleasures of life - even on one occasion sleeping on a bed of nails in order to
suppress his sexual urges - so that he can concentrate on the coming revolution.
This novel served as an inspiration to many young revolutionaries, including
Lenin himself, who called it ‘a book that changes one for a whole lifetime’. Sergei
Nechaev, the first revolutionary writer to come from a peasant background,
published a pamphlet entitled A Programme of Revolutionary Action (1868),
while Petr Tkachev produced The Tasks of Revolutionary Propaganda in Russia
(1874). They all agreed that for a revolution to take place, dynamic leadership
would be needed. They advocated the creation of a small group of full-time
professional revolutionaries who would be totally dedicated and utterly ruthless.
They wanted the revolution as soon as possible because the longer it was delayed,

the more industrialized Russia would become on Western capitalist lines; this
would destroy the peasant commune and their vision of Russia's future along
with it. They disagreed with the moderates about the future role of the state -
they believed that the state should not wither away; in fact it would be needed all
the more, so that the leaders, the elite group who had guided and inspired the
peasant revolution, could introduce a full socialist society. Lavrov had serious
misgivings about this view: he felt it might easily end in dictatorship, which could
be just as bad as tsarism.
This phase of Populist thinking led, in 1873-74, to a mass campaign in which
thousands of the intelligentsia and university students went to the villages to
spend time with the peasants. The movement had no central organization and
there seemed to be several different aims. Some simply wanted to experience life
in a commune, some wanted to educate the peasants about their future role in
a socialist society, and others hoped to spread revolutionary propaganda and
start activist groups. However, there was very little positive response from the
peasants: they were suspicious of their unexpected visitors and some even
reported them to the police. The authorities were greatly disturbed and arrested
hundreds of the Narodniki The failure of the campaign came as a great dis
appointment to the Populists: clearly the peasants lacked that vital revolutionary
potential, and so the moderates were discredited. This caused a swing towards
terrorism: a party calling itself ‘Land and Freedom' spread propaganda among
the intelligentsia, workers and peasants, while at the same time carrying out
assassinations of various officials. Later, some of the extremists formed a group
called the ‘People's Will’, and in 1881 their campaign of violence culminated in
the assassination of the Tsar Alexander II. This brought the socialist state no
nearer; its main effect was to frighten the tsarist regime into a policy of riîore
repression. This phase of revolutionary activity ended with many of the leading
figures in jail and many others in exile.
(c) Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) N

Gradually a new generation of activists began to emerge in the late 1880s as
successors of the earlier Populists. They were agrarian socialists who believed
that after the overthrow of the existing regime, all land should be shared out
among the peasants. Like the Populists they hoped that the new Russia would be
a mainly agrarian society based on small peasant communes with collective
ownership of the land. Some of the SRs favoured terrorism and others wanted
factories to be taken into collective ownership as well. SR groups were formed in
towns like Saratov on the Volga, and Minsk (Belorussia), while Viktor Chernov set
up a terrorist group in Berlin in 1901. An SR central party organization was formed
in Geneva in 1902, where it published its own newspaper which circulated
throughout Russia. During the 30 years following the failure of the Narodniki, the
peasants in many regions had become more militant; from 1902 onwards there
were a number of peasant revolts. During the 1905 revolution SR agents were busy
stirring up the countryside; in July the first meeting of the All-Russian Peasant
Union was held just outside Moscow. They drew up a programme which
included an elected Constituent Assembly and the seizure of all land belonging
26 Mastering Twentieth-Century RiAsiàn History

to the royal family, the Church and private landowners. It is not clear just how far
the peasants themselves were taking the initiative or whether they were being led
by the SRs who attended the meeting. What is clear is that by 1905 there were
substantial numbers of peasants who were militant enough to act independently,
and there was a wave of attacks on the private property of landlords.11What also
emerges is that there was growing support for the SRs among industrial workers
in the towns. One important development that took place in 1905 was the
appearance of committees (soviets) of elected representatives of workers, soldiers
and peasants. Both the soviets and the strike committees included Socialist
Revolutionaries and members of the other great socialist party of the time - the
Social Democrats. After 1905 the government's policy of encouraging peasants to
leave the commune and buy land of their own threatened to destroy the whole
basis of the SR programme (see section 2.4(a)). Many SRs were in exile, and for
the time being there was a decline in support for the party.
(d) Karl Marx and Marxism

The other great Russian socialist party was the Social Democrats who took their
ideas originally from the writings of the German philosopher, Karl Marx (1818-83).
After the failure of the German revolutions of 1848, Marx settled in London and
spent many years writing about politics, economics and society. His two most
famous works were The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867). He was
not a politician or even an active revolutionary (at least after 1848); he was
a historian and political theorist, but his ideas had enormous influence on socialist
and left-wing political thought. The main points that he made were:
• History is never static: change is always taking place in every society and the
changes are caused by economic factors - by the relationships between the
various classes in society.
• The important factor was who controlled the means of production. Whoever
they were, these controllers would exploit the rest of the population and
would become more or less synonymous with the state. The whole state system
would be geared to further and protect their interests.
• However, this situation could not be permanent, because new factors would
develop which would enable other classes to challenge the dominant class.
There would be a constant class struggle, and eventually a new class would
win the struggle and take control from the previous dominant class. The new
ruling class would then change the state system to suit their interests.
Marx developed these theories from his study of the history of Western Europe,
where, he believed, the sequence of events had followed this pattern. The first
dominant class had been the feudal aristocracy who controlled the factors of
production - the land and the peasants who farmed it for them. The next stage,
which came with the development of a money economy instead of the feudal
barter economy, was when the bourgeois capitalists became dominant. They
overthrew the autocratic monarchy and set up systems of liberal democracy
which safeguarded private property; the prime example of this was the French

revolution which began in 1789. Eventually this bourgeois class began to indus
trialize, thus creating a large class of industrial workers. The time would come
when the working class grew so powerful that they would be able to challenge the
capitalists and launch a revolution. The proletariat (the skilled working class)
would become the new dominant class and would run the government in their
interests - it would be a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat'. Marx thought this stage
would probably be achieved at a time when capitalist governments were pre
occupied with some great disaster which would be a by-product of capitalism;
this might be a major war in which the capitalist states fought each other for
supremacy, or it might be a great economic crisis caused by the nature of capital
ism. ‘What the bourgeoisie produces, above all,’ wrote Marx in The Communist
Manifesto, ‘are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are
equally inevitable.’
The final stage of development would be the classless society - a partnership in
which everybody contributed-what they could. There would be no need for the
state which would consequently ‘wither away’. The principle would be: ‘from
each according to his ability, to each according to his need’. Towards the end of
his life Marx modified some of his views and conceded that some flexibility was
possible, depending on circumstances.
The Communist Manifesto was soon available in Russia in translation, having
somehow succeeded in passing the censor, and Capital was translated into
Russian in 1872. Many Populists found Marx’s ideas attractive but they were
disturbed by his portrayal of ‘bourgeois society’ in Western Europe and were
determined that such developments in Russia should be avoided at all costs.
Marx was impressed by the enthusiasm of the Populists and he admitted that
Russia might be a special case: if the revolutionaries acted quickly enough it
would perhaps be possible for Russia to combine the two revolutions - the liberal
bourgeois overthrow of the feudal monarchy and the workers’ overthrow of the
bourgeois capitalists - and so by-pass the capitalist stage altogether. The work
ers’ socialist state could then be based on the village commune. However, there
was one vital condition that must be fulfilled: the Russian revolution must be the
signal for proletarian revolutions in the West; only as part of a wider series of
revolutions could the Russian double-revolution have any chance of success.
(e) Social Democrats

After the failure of the Populist movement many young socialists turned against
the idea of a society based on the peasant commune and decided that the best
way forward was to go along with industrialization and the progress towards the
bourgeois capitalist phase. They supported industrialization because it was
a necessary stage on the way to socialism. The intelligentsia were fascinated by
Marxism because it seemed to offer a solution to the country's basic problems of
backwardness and autocracy: Marx’s ideas showed that Russia could catch up
with the West, could absorb Western culture, and eventually could sweep away
the tsarist regime, the great obstacle to progress. The leading figure was Georgi
Plekhanov (1856-1918), a former Populist living in exile in Geneva. Calling
themselves Marxists, he and his supporters founded the Emancipation of Labour

Group (1883). It was only logical that they saw the urban working class as their
main ally, and with the spread of industrialization in the 1890s, they organised
study groups to educate workers about politics and particularly Marxism. In 1898
the Russian Social Democrat Labour Party was formed; its first congress was held
at Minsk, though the party was illegal. Members moved on from merely holding
discussions groups - they became more directly involved in workers’organizations
and in strikes, and in 1905 they had an important role to play in the revolution.
Social Democrats had problems deciding exactly what their party programme
should be. Their ultímate aim of course was a socialist revolution to overthrow
the liberal bourgeois state. However, according to Marx’s analysis, Russia was one
stage behind Western Europe where the capitalist phase was well advanced. Rus
sia’s liberal bourgeois revolution had not yet happened: the Social Democrats
were therefore working for the revolution after next, and that could only take
place when the industrial working class had grown large enough. This could take
years and was discouraging for the Russian Marxists. Nevertheless Plekhanov
stuck rigidly to the view that they must keep to Marx’s original sequence, and he
ignored Marx's later suggestion that both revolutions might be combined.
Another problem was what attitude they should adopt towards the liberals.
A group calling themselves the ‘legal Marxists’ argued that they should concen
trate on working with the liberal movement, which was beginning to gather
strength at the turn of the century. They seemed prepared to be satisfied with the
gains to be made once the liberal revolution was achieved, and their interest in
the next revolution seemed to have waned. Capitalism and socialism could be
reconciled with each other under a democratic system. This aroused criticism
among the rank and file and eventually the ‘legal Marxists' left the party and joined
the liberal opposition.
Another group calling themselves ‘the Economists’ argued that the workers
should concentrate on economic issues - for example, by working through trade
unions to improve conditions for the workers. Both Plekhanov and Lenin rejected
this view, protesting that they were not reformers, they were revolutionaries; if
workers' conditions and wages improved substantially, they would be less
inclined to join revolutionary movements, and the socialist revolution would be
less likely. Although these unwelcome views were silenced, the dilemma about
trade unions remained: should they be encouraged or not?
(f) Lenin and the split in the Social Democrat Party

One of the outstanding Marxists of the younger generation was Vladimir Ulyanov
(1870-1924), who later took the alias Lenin. He came from a highly respectable
middle class family in Simbirsk province on the Volga, where his father was
Director of Popular Schools. It came as a great shock when in 1887 his older
brother Alexander was executed for being involved in a plot to assassinate the
Tsar Alexander III. The death of his admired elder brother no doubt moved the
young Vladimir to join agrarian socialist groups to find out more about what had
inspired Alexander. Soon after this, he read Chemyshevsky’s novel What is to be
Done? which fired his imagination. Later he became deeply impressed by Marx’s
writings and in 1893 moved from his home city of Simbirsk to St Petersburg,

where he became active in politics. Tfie secret police were soon on to him and
after fifteen months in jail followed by three years’ exile in Siberia, he decided to
leave Russia, moving first to Munich and settling eventually in Geneva. In 1900
he and a group of friends began a newspaper, Iskra (The Spark), which was
smuggled into Russia. In 1902 he published a booklet called What is to be Done? He
borrowed the title from Chernyshevsky’s novel and sent the booklet into Russia
under the name N. Lenin, to confuse the censor and the secret police. It was this
booklet which first brought him to the notice of the Marxist movement inside
Russia, and so most people knew him as Lenin from then on. It contained his
views on the organization and role of the Social Democrat Party; these eventually
became known as Marxism-Leninism.
Most importantly, it must be a completely new type of party, strictly disciplined
and centralized, and led by a small elite group of dedicated, full-time, profes
sional revolutionaries, working in secret. A more widely based party consisting of
anybody who felt like joining would not have the necessary impact. These
professionals could come from any class in society - intelligentsia, middle or
working class; dedication was the vital requirement, not membership of any par
ticular class. Lenin stressed the importance of unity of aims and ideas in order to
keep internal party divisions to a minimum. This ‘party of a new type’ must act as
the vanguard of the workers’ revolution, to lead the way and show them the need
to overthrow the autocracy. Lenin believed that left to themselves, workers could
only achieve ‘a trade-union consciousness’ and not a revolutionary one. They
must be shown that working via trade unions to improve workers’ conditions
was not enough: their revolutionary consciousness must be aroused too. Once
this had been achieved, the working classes should lead the other discontented
groups in society, including the peasants. When that happened, nothing^Quld
save the Tsarist system, and it would be possible to combine the two revolutions
and move straight to the dictatorship of the proletariat. These ideas caused quite
a stir among Russian Marxists, because although Lenin claimed that they were
orthodox Marxism, they bore many similarities to the ideas of the Populists. The
emphasis on centralization and tight discipline was reminiscent of the views of
Tkachev in his 1874 pamphlet. Many Marxists, including Plekhanov, began to
suspect Lenin of developing dictatorial tendencies.
Disagreements came to a head at the second party congress which began in
Brussels in 1903. Harassed by the police, the delegates soon moved to London
where the conference continued in a Congregational chapel. The basic dispute
arose between Lenin and Yuli Martov over the question of who should be
allowed to join the party. The differences in their verbal definitions of a party
member seem trivial; what the dispute amounted to was that Lenin wanted
members who actively participated - the full-time professionals, while Martov
wanted people who gave regular assistance - in other words, a mass membership,
who would help whenever they could. Lenin lost this vote but won the next one -
over the membership of the board of Iskra, the party newspaper. Lenin wanted
to reduce the board from six members to three, but was opposed by Martov
who saw this as a bid by Lenin to control the party. Lenin and his supporters won
the vote and began to call themselves Bolsheviks (Majority), while Martov
responded, ill-advisedly, by calling his supporters Mensheviks (Minority), not an
30 Mastering Twentieth-Century Ri^si^n History

auspicious name to choose for a party. Relations between the three-man board -
Lenin, Martov and Plekhanov - soon became tense; Lenin resigned and in 1904
founded his own newspaper - Vperod (Forward).
When it first happened, the split seemed unlikely to be permanent. The Men
sheviks especially tried to heal the rift and both groups continued to work
together in the provinces; but as time went on the two sections grew apart and
their programmes became distinct.
The Bolsheviks continued to favour a small elite leadership group and grad
ually recognized Lenin as their leader. Lenin was excited by the events of 1905,
realizing that before long the situation might be ripe for full-scale revolution. He
did not believe in waiting for the bourgeois revolution, since the liberal and
middle class parties in Russia could not be trusted even to get the first revolution
started. In Two Tactics of Social Democracy written while the events of 1905 were
in full swing, he explained that the task was to galvanize the urban workers and
the peasants into a sort of one-stage, continuous revolution. He also talked about
a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the
peasantry.' After 1905 his writings and speeches became increasingly violent - he
used phrases such as ‘armed insurrection’, ‘mass terror’, ‘civil war’ and ‘the expro
priation of gentry land’. His closest supporters saw nothing objectionable about
this sort of language. As Robert Service points out, ‘Bolsheviks were a ruthless
bunch. They expected to make a revolution and to have to fight against counter
revolutionary forces, and did not see why they should eschew the violent meth
ods developed by Robespierre and his confederates in the French Revolution.'12
The Mensheviks foolishly continued to use this party label, which gave them
the image of a small minority party, even though they were a larger group than the
Bolsheviks. They wanted to stick to the orthodox Marxist pattern: they were
against the idea of the centralized, disciplined party; they were prepared to wait
for the bourgeois revolution to overthrow the autocracy and then to wait until the
industrial workers were in a majority over the peasants before launching the pro
letarian revolution. There was a small group of Mensheviks, including Leon Trotsky
(1879-1940), who wanted to force the pace towards revolution. Trotsky was attracted
by the idea of a ‘continuous’ or ‘permanent’ revolution, but he was not impressed
by the Leninist elite leadership group, which he thought might easily lead to a
dictatorship. However, in July 1917 Trotsky formally joined the Bolsheviks.
(g) Liberals
The liberals in late nineteenth century Russia were arguably the most important
political movement of the time. They were mainly members of the intelligentsia
and the rapidly growing professional class of teachers, doctors, lawyers, engin
eers, managers, writers and students. They were people who were exasperated
with government incompetence and corruption and with their own inability to
influence national politics. Many of them were members of zemstva or were
employed by zemstva and so had first-hand knowledge of how successful they
could be. There was a wide range of opinion among liberals: moderates would be
satisfied with an extension of the zemstvo principle at national level, so that the
Tsar would at least consult with the representatives of his people. When Nicholas II

came to the throne in 1894 some liberals expressed the hope that, unlike his
father, he would allow public opinion to be expressed and would actually take
notice of it; to which suggestion Nicholas is said to have replied that they were
‘intoxicated by senseless dreaming.' Other moderates were more interested in
social reform - they believed in primary education for everybody and wanted to
improve the conditions of the peasants. Radical liberals wanted a constitutional
monarchy whose power was limited by an elected parliament.
Although liberals were not thinking in terms of armed uprising like the SRs,
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, they were viewed with just as much suspicion by the
Okhrana, the tsarist secret police. After all, these were the people who, in the
Marxist analysis of things, would eventually organize the bourgeois revolution.
They were unable to operate as a political party inside Russia, and if they
seriously wanted to promote their ideas, they had to live abroad. In 1901 the
newspaper Liberation was launched in Germany by Petr Struve, a former Marxist,
who also formed the Union,, of Liberation in 1903. Struve argued that violent
revolution was not the way forward for Russia - the country needed a period of
political and social evolution on Western European lines. The Union was by far
the most popular of the radical organizations with university students. But it was
harassed so much by the police, in spite of its moderate views, that the members
became more militant; at a meeting held in St Petersburg in January 1904, they
drew up a programme which included a parliament elected by universal suffrage,
self-determination for the non-Russians in the empire, and far-reaching social
reforms. In the months before the 1905 revolution they were the most open
critics of the autocracy with their ‘reform banquets’ (see section 2.3(b)).
After the October Manifesto (see section 2.3(c)) the moderate liberals were at
last able to organize themselves into a political party, becoming known as the
Constitutional Democrats (Kadets). They were far from satisfied with the Mani
festo’s concessions, but were prepared to accept them and to try and use them in
order to bring about full democracy. Their programme was to work for a ‘rule-of-
law state’ in the interests of all classes, nationalities and peoples, and to strive
‘not only for workers and peasants, but for the welfare and prosperity of all
classes, of the entire Russian state.’13This rather generalized attitude meant that
the Kadets were distancing themselves from any particular social group. This
probably turned out to be a serious weakness because it left them without any
strong social base: they were now perceived as too bourgeois for the industrial
workers and peasants and too radical for the majority of nobles and wealthy
industrialists.
2.3 The revolution of 1905

(a) The revolution begins14
The series of events known as the 1905 revolution actually began in 1904 and
continued on into 1907. By January 1905 feeling against the autocracy had
reached unprecedented heights. On Sunday 9 January there was a protest march
by St Petersburg workers, organized not by revolutionaries but by Father Gapon,

an Orthodox priest. It was a peaceful demonstration which aimed to present
a petition to the Tsar at the Winter Palace, to let him know what their grievances
were. It was a widely held, though naive view that the Tsar himself was not to
blame for the situation - this was the responsibility of officials and nobles who
oppressed the workers. If only they could meet the Tsar and let him know their
problems, he would put everything right. Gapon had been organizing workers’
groups of the type allowed by the government - a sort of tame trade union under
police supervision - since 1903, but the authorities were worried that he would
be unable to control a large demonstration; on 7 January he was ordered to cancel
it. He was determined to go ahead, convinced that the Tsar, the ‘Little Father’ of
his people, would never allow his troops to fire on a peaceful demonstration.
However, Nicholas had arranged to be away from St Petersburg that day. As they
approached the Winter Palace, the workers, with lots of women and children in
the front ranks, were charged by cavalry and then fired on by the infantry. Alto
gether that day - ‘Bloody Sunday’ as it became known - about 200 people were
killed, including many children and spectators, and around 800 wounded (see
Documents B and C).
The shootings aroused a sense of outrage throughout the country; there was
a wave of strikes, with workers forming their own committees (soviets) for the first
time, mutinies in some parts of the army and navy, national uprisings, peasant
uprisings and attacks on officials. At times it seemed that the monarchy could
not survive, so widespread was the disaffection and the anger of the people,
which sprang from so many different grievances.
(b) W hat were the causes of the 1905 revolution?

There was widespread discontent among industrial workers, a class which had
grown rapidly during the industrialization of the 1880s and 1890s. Hours of work
were long: factory workers had to do a 12-hour day and were sometimes required
to work as long as 16 hours. Working conditions, especially in industries like
mining and oil, were dangerous and insurance was non-existent. Wages were low
and irregularly paid; although a few trade unions had been legalized, they were
kept under close police supervision and strikes were illegal. Most employers
refused even to discuss workers’ grievances. An economic depression beginning
in 1900 caused unemployment and wage reductions. On top of all this, living
conditions were primitive; groups of workers had to share accommodation at
exorbitant rents or were forced to live in barracks attached to the factories. Many
intelligent workers who could read and write were familiar with Marxist pam
phlets which had great influence on the militant labour movement.
A number of strikes had already taken place although they were illegal. The
first major one was in St Petersburg in 1896 and there was a miners’ strike in the
Donetz Basin in 1900. Troops were used to deal with a strike at Rostov-on-Don in
1902, and an attempted general strike in St Petersburg in 1903 was foiled by the
army. The main organization of these strikes was carried out by the independent
labour movement; but there is also evidence that the Social Democrats played an
important part by spreading the propaganda which helped to win such wide
support for the strikes. Nor were the Social Democrats all members of the

intelligentsia - for example, Semeon Kanatchikov, whose father had been a serf,
moved into Moscow and became a skilled worker in the machine-making indus
try; he read Marx, and on the eve of the 1905 revolution, he left his job to become
a full-time ‘professional revolutionary’ in the Bolshevik party.15 Many working
class grievances were reflected in the demands which Gapon’s marchers hoped
to present to the Tsar: a maximum eight-hour working day, a minimum wage,
the abolition of overtime, and factories ‘where it is possible to work without risk
of death from wind, rain and snow'.
Peasant poverty was a continuing problem. It is true that by 1905 peasants
owned 68 per cent of Russia’s arable land and that many of them rented extra
land from landowners; but the rapid increase in the peasant population meant
that it was still a struggle for most peasants to produce enough to feed their fam
ilies, especially when rents were often unreasonably high. In some fertile areas
landowners stopped renting out land and turned their estates into commercial
farming enterprises, growing^wheat and sugar-beet They used harvesters and
threshing machines, which meant fewer labouring jobs for peasants. This
happened in Poltava province, and so it was no coincidence that the first serious
outbreak of peasant violence took place there in 1902. Thousands of peasants
were forced to leave the countryside to find work in the industrial cities, where
they came into contact with many types of political propagandists. They kept
their links with the villages, and so it was a two-way process: peasant unrest was
brought to the cities, fuelled by political propaganda, and then revolutionary
ideas were taken back to the villages.
The intelligentsia, university students and many of the business community
resented their lack of political influence. There were no signs that Nicholas II had
any vision of the future, and they had to stand by and watch while the archaic
and incompetent political system made only a half-hearted attempt to modernize
Russia. The irony was that in order to modernize, the regime needed more
educated people; but the larger the educated class became, the more numerous
and influential the critics of the autocracy became. And most of them were con
vinced that only by removing the autocracy could real progress be made. Large
numbers of the intelligentsia became activists, joining organizations like the
liberal Union of Liberation and the Social Democrats. Even Savva Morozov, the
wealthy industrialist, contributed to Social Democrat funds. ' »
All classes resented the government's repressive policies and the fact that
Russia was a police state. The limits on the powers of the zemstvo, were bitterly
resented by the people most closely involved in their work - thought to be
around 70,000 of the intelligentsia in 1905. University students were not allowed
to form societies or hold political meetings and any political offender could be
held indefinitely without trial. In 1901 there was a huge student demonstration in
St Petersburg supported by many members of the liberal bourgeoisie. Without
warning a detachment of mounted Cossacks charged into the crowd, killing
13 people and injuring hundreds of others. Around 1500 students were arrested
and imprisoned. This sort of treatment only served to make students more
militant - there was a rush to join the Socialist Revolutionaries who launched
a campaign of terror in retaliation, and some joined the Social Democrats. The
most popular organization for students \yas the liberal Union of Liberation.
34 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rîsîan History

Russia suffered humiliating defeats in a war with Japan. In January 1904 Russia
became involved in the conflict with Japan over control of Manchuria and Korea.
The government thought that the Japanese would be no match for their military
machine. Having deliberately pursued a provocative expansionist policy in the
Far East and refused offers of compromise, the Russians allowed the Japanese to
make the first move by attacking their fleet in the harbour at Port Arthur in
Manchuria. Japanese troops occupied Korea and besieged Port Arthur. By the
end of the year the Russian army had failed to reach Port Arthur, which was on
the point of surrendering, and their Baltic fleet was still on its seven-month voyage
round the world in a vain attempt to raise the siege. Port Arthur surrendered in
January 1905; the Baltic fleet did not arrive until near the end of May, when it was
almost completely destroyed by the Japanese in less than two hours. The army
was poorly equipped with old-fashioned weaponry, the generals were incompe
tent and the navy useless. Again, the government was blamed for failing to look
after the country’s interests.
The revolutionary parties drew strength from these disasters. The Socialist
Revolutionaries continued their campaign of terror: several important officials
were assassinated, and the climax came with the murder of the Minister of the
Interior, Plehve, who was killed by a bomb in July 1904. Marxist propaganda had
a part to play in numerous strikes, culminating in a big strike in St Petersburg
which began on 3 January 1905. The main opposition centred around the liberals
who started a campaign of banquets, a type of public gathering still allowed by
the police, at which activists made stirring speeches, which were widely reported,
calling for a national zemstvo assembly; by November 1905 they were demanding
a Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage. But Nicholas would make
no concessions which might in any way limit his absolute power. ‘I will never
agree to the representative form of government, because I consider it harmful to
the people whom God has entrusted to me,' he told Prince Mirsky, the new
Minister of the Interior, who tried to persuade him that if nothing was done,
there would soon be revolution.
(c) Events in the revolution

The shooting of peaceful unarmed protestors, including women and children,
singing hymns and carrying religious icons and portraits of the Tsar, caused
a wave of disgust and revulsion. Some writers see it as a turning-point in the
history of Tsarism, because it destroyed the idea that the Tsar really cared about
his people, and seemed to support the view of the revolutionaries that the auto
cracy was to blame for all their sufferings. The prestige of the monarchy among
ordinary people fell to its lowest point. Events began to escalate out of control:•
• There was an outbreak of strikes throughout the country, with something like
half a million workers involved by the end of January.
• In rural areas peasants went on the rampage, looting and burning the houses
of the wealthy and seizing pasture land. There were over 3000 such uprisings
in 1905. But it wasn’t all violence - in many areas peasants, helped by teachers
and radical priests, set up unions and co-operatives. Some of the larger

villages ran themselves almost as independent republics with elected
‘governments'.
• Some sections of the army and navy mutinied. The most famous incident was
the mutiny on board the battleship Potemkin at Odessa on the Black Sea.
There were also disturbances among troops returning from Manchuria after
suffering defeat in the war with Japan.
• Some of the subject nationalities seized the chance to protest and there were
huge demonstrations in Poland, Latvia and Finland. In Georgia the Mensheviks
in effect ran a separate national state, with the full support of the peasants.
• Beginning in September with a strike of Moscow printers, a massive wave of
strikes developed across the country which by mid-October had become virtu
ally a general strike. When railway workers joined in, the whole nation was
brought to a standstill, and the movement of troops and supplies was hampered.
• In St Petersburg workers elected a council, the Soviet, to co-ordinate the
strikes and formulate their demands. It had 50 members, including seven
from each of the socialist parties - Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and Socialist
Revolutionaries. Before long it had taken on the characteristics of an alterna
tive form of government which could take over whenever the autocracy should
collapse. For a time Trotsky acted as chairman. Other cities soon followed the
example of St Petersburg; in practice, as well as organizing the strikes, the
Soviets served as emergency municipal governments, keeping law and order
and overseeing the distribution of food in areas where the government had
lost control (see Document D).
• Nicholas was faced with two options: he could either use troops to crush all
opposition, or he could make concessions. All through the summer his
instinct told him to use force; by October all his advisers were telling hihrthat
to make concessions was the only way. They were not sure whether they could
rely on the troops to obey orders to shoot down large numbers of ordinary,
innocent people. Count Witte told him that he must allow a democratically
elected parliament and full civil rights. After his cousin, the Grand Duk^Nicholas,
had threatened to shoot himself if he refused, the Tsar finally agreed. The
October Manifesto, a document drawn up by Witte, seemed to grant much of
what the liberals were asking for: an elected national assembly known as the
Duma, which would have the right to approve all laws; freedom of speech,
conscience and association (which meant that trade unions and political
parties could exist legally); a relaxation of the press censorship and freedom
from unwarranted arrest.
• Although the wording of the document was deliberately vague, so that it was
full of loopholes, it had the effect that Witte was hoping for - it split the
opposition. The minority of right-wing liberals greeted it with enthusiasm and
rallied in support of the Manifesto and the Tsar, calling themselves Octobrists.
The more radical liberals or Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), withheld
approval, hoping for more concessions. However, both groups suspended
revolutionary activities and devoted their energies to forming themselves into
parties and preparing for the Duma elections. On the other hand the workers
and socialist groups became more militant; Lenin returned from Geneva early
in November and urged that the pressure must be maintained.

• The Soviet tried to keep the revolution going by calling a general strike in
St Petersburg, but by 3 December Witte felt strong enough to have the leaders
of the Soviet arrested. News of this provoked the Moscow Social Democrats to
launch an uprising which won considerable support among the workers. By
12 December the rebels controlled the main railway stations and large parts of
the city. Witte did not hesitate to send troops in, and the rising was crushed by
23 December; over a thousand people were killed.
During 1906 the regime carried out a harsh campaign to punish the revolutionar
ies; the militants responded by assassinating some 2000 government officials in
1906 alone. Order was eventually restored with great brutality in both town and
countryside and the Georgian peasant republic was stamped out. It has been
calculated that by April 1906, when the first Duma met, the regime had already
executed 15,000 people, shot or wounded at least 20,000 and exiled 45,000.16
Nevertheless the Octobrists viewed the so-called revolution as a success - worth
while gains had been made. The other revolutionary groups saw it as a complete
failure - nothing less than the overthrow of the monarchy would satisfy them.
Although the liberals had not supported the attack on the workers and peasants,
from now on the SDs and SRs saw them as weak and unreliable allies.
(d) Why did the autocracy survive?

The various revolutionary groups were not united and were aiming for different
things; although they caused chaos and brought the country to a standstill, the
movement lacked central direction. The urban and rural revolutions did not
occur simultaneously - disturbances in the countryside only gained momentum
in the summer of 1905; things calmed down towards the end of the year and then
violence reached a new peak in 1906; but by then it was too late - the regime had
recovered its strength. Its chances of survival received a boost when Witte suc
ceeded in ending the war with Japan in August 1905. The Treaty of Portsmouth
(New Hampshire, USA) gave the Russians a reasonable peace settlement, consid
ering that they had lost the war; it also meant that its troops could be brought
home ready for action against the revolutionaries, at least once the railway strike
was over. In spite of some sporadic mutinies, the army stayed loyal and obeyed
orders, even though the majority were from peasant backgrounds. Most important
of all, it was the intervention of Witte, persuading Nicholas to make concessions,
that broke the unity of the opposition and allowed the government a breathing
space to bring the army into action.
2.4 Russian agriculture in 19 14 - how backward

was it?
As we saw in section 2.1(g), one of the most serious problems in the Russian
empire was the backward state of agriculture and the poverty of most peasants.
At the root of the problem lay the rapidly increasing population in rural areas;

some estimates suggest that it grew by 20 per cent - a rise of over 20 million -
between 1900 and 1914. The small size of peasant holdings and old-fashioned
methods of farming hampered progress. Some advances had been made, but it
was still a constant struggle to produce enough food. After the 1905 revolution
the government made a determined effort at agrarian reform.
(a) Stolypin and the V ager on the strong9

Petr Stolypin (1862-1911), Prime Minister from 1906 until he was assassinated in
1911, came to the conclusion that the autocracy’s best hope of survival was to win
the support of a large proportion of the peasants. This had been conspicuously
lacking in 1905. Stolypin’s plan was to break up the peasant communes which were
an obstacle to efficient farming, and to develop a class of independent, prosperous
and go-ahead peasants, the ‘strong and sober' peasant households, who would be
loyal to the monarchy; this would make revolution less likely and at the same time
help to increase food production. He told the Duma: ‘the government has placed
its wager on the strong and the sturdy, not on the needy and the drunken;’ given
twenty years of peace, he argued, there would be no prospect of revolution.
He began with an important concession: redemption payments were can
celled. He followed this by doing all he could to encourage peasants to leave their
village communes in order to consolidate their strips into one large enclosed
farm which was now their own property; they could also buy and sell land, move
into a town or migrate to a different rural area. It is estimated that between 1906
and 1915 around 3.5 million people moved to Siberia and bought land, using
low-interest loans provided by a government-sponsored Peasant Land Bank.
Some ambitious peasants did extremely well and were even able to buy land from
struggling noble landlords. These prosperous peasants, labelled as kulaks (fists)
by Soviet historians, usually employed other peasants as labourers and used the
new techniques - crop rotation, chemical fertilizers and modem tools, and bought
the latest agricultural machines. The main product was grain - whea| and rye,
but in some areas peasants diversified their activities - there was a big increase in
potato and sugar beet production and dairy produce became more important.
Another sign of progress was the growth in agricultural education: in 1895 for
example, only 75 students had degrees in agronomy; by 1912 there were 3922.
However, Stolypin’s scheme seems to have had only limited success, and after
his death in 1911, the government lost interest. According to Robert Service, by
1916 only a tenth of the households in the European part of Russia had left the
commune and successfully set up consolidated farms; in the most fertile areas
such as the Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus - the great grain-producing
areas - the average farm was only about 15 acres.17 Many others had formally
separated from the mir but had been held up by all the legal and practical prob
lems involved. In fact the administrative system in rural areas was inadequate for
carrying out such a complex change. At the outbreak of the First World War,
kulaks were only a tiny proportion - perhaps two per cent of the total population;
the vast majority of peasants remained poverty-stricken and resentful. They were
reluctant to leave the relative security of the commune, inadequate though it
was, to take all the risks involved in independent farming, and more and more of

them were becoming landless labourers. What they most coveted was the uncul
tivated land in the hands of big landlords, the Tsar and the Church, which they
felt could be put to much better use. The basic economic questions were: how
much grain could the peasants keep or control for themselves, how much could
the state and the landlords take from them in rents and taxes, and how much
grain did they have left over once the family had been fed?
(b) Agricultural statistics

Russian statistics are notoriously unreliable, and yet it is always tempting to try
and see whether or not they bear out general impressions. How far were the
Stolypin reforms reflected in the available statistics of output? Several historians
have attempted to calculate what really happened. One of the earliest was the
Russian Soviet historian Petr Lyashchenko (1949) who argued that between 1900
and 1913 there was quite a rapid increase in agricultural production, because of
improved methods and a run of good summers. He calculated that the net
income of agriculture increased by 88.6 per cent in that period; however, this is
not as impressive as it might seem, since it was a period of rising world agricul
tural prices. The actual increase in output was more like 35 per cent. Grain
exports were 50 per cent higher on average in the years 1911-13 than they were in
1901-05, and Russia was the largest cereal exporter in the world. Most Western
historians accept Lyashchenko's statistics as fair and reasonable, since Soviet
historians are not noted for exaggerating the achievements of the Tsarist state.
A different sort of calculation was carried out by the French historian P. Bairoch
(1965) who compared productivity in millions of calories per male agricultural
worker in various countries, in 1860 and 1910. In Russia there was significant
growth, but given the length of the period covered - 50 years - it was not all that
great:
1860 1910
USA 22.5 42.0
UK 20.0 23.5
France 14.5 17.0
Spain 11.0 8.5
Germany 10.5 25.0
Sweden 10.5 16.0
Russia 7.5 11.0
Italy 5.0 6.5
The best that can be said for Russia, judging from these statistics, apart from the
fact that she moved one place up the league table, overtaking Spain, is that her
agricultural output was growing faster than that of either Britain or France.
The great question is: would this modest improvement have been sufficient
to feed the population and develop a prosperous and loyal peasantry? Some
Western historians believe that it would, and that if it had not been for the
tragedy of the First World War, revolution would have been avoided. But it has to

be said that the statistics do not completely bear this out. Alec Nove points out
that the overall annual growth rate for agriculture in the period 1860-1914 was
only 1.7 pçr cent, which was only a fraction above the rate of population increase.
Thus food consumption per head could hardly have increased at all, especially
bearing in mind the increased exports, though admittedly the potential was there
at least to feed the population.18
As to a prosperous and loyal peasantry becoming the rock on which the auto
cracy could survive, the majority view is that although many peasants were doing
well, they were not a large enough proportion of the total to be able to save the
monarchy. Given the growing population, there simply wasn't sufficient land to
enable a large enough proportion of the peasants to set up consolidated farms,
even if they had wanted to. The ill-feeling between the gentry and prosperous
peasants on one side and poverty-stricken landless labourers on the other
produced a potentially dangerous situation in the countryside. The thousands of
peasants who were forced off the land and into the towns and cities only added
to the discontented mass of industrial workers. There is a great deal of contempor
ary evidence supporting the picture of an agrarian crisis among poor peasants:
reports of reduced numbers of livestock owned by peasants, worsening diet and
primitive living conditions. Although redemption payments were abolished after
the 1905 revolution, indirect taxes continued to increase, so that by 1911 the total
taxation which peasants had to pay was almost as high as it had been 20 years
earlier. There were high taxes for instance on oil, which peasants needed for
heating and lighting, on sugar, and on tobacco and vodka.
On the other hand, not all historians are convinced by this analysis; revisionist
historians have pointed out that much of the contemporary evidence of peasant
poverty is anecdotal, that it is confined to a limited area, and that it originated
from people who wanted to blacken the tsarist regime. Peter Gatrell shows that
new crops, new types of seed, more crop rotations and more fertilizers were being
used, resulting in a substantial rise in yields.19In 1994 Stephen Hoch published
his investigations of population growth and living standards in the countryside;
he came to the conclusion that peasant poverty, land-hunger and overpdpulation
had been exaggerated, and that living standards were clearly rising.20 In fact it is
estimated that by 1916 almost 90 per cent of all sown land in European Russia
was being farmed by peasants, that 80 per cent of all farm machinery was owned
by peasants, and that 87 per cent of the total value of the empire’s agricultural
output between 1909 and 1913 was produced by the peasants.21 There is also
evidence of a rise in peasant savings and an increase in the wages of farm labour
ers. Moreover, statistics suggest that even with rising grain exports, there was still
more grain left per head of the population than there had been 20 years earlier; in
other words, grain production was outpacing the population growth.
So was there an agrarian crisis or not? It is important not to generalize about the
whole empire from what happened in one area. Peter Waldron, one of the most
recent writers about the last years of tsarism, points out that there was a wide
variation in the conditions of agriculture, depending on the region, and there
were variations within each region. It was only to be expected that peasants in
the fertile Black-Earth provinces would be more successful than those in less
fertile areas. He concludes that ‘the peasant economy was a patchwork. Some

peasants prospered, while others became more and more impoverished. Overall
the Russian agricultural economy avoided crisis in the half-century after eman
cipation, despite the huge increase in the empire's population, and yet failed to
make the spectacular progress anticipated from changes to the framework of
rural life.'22
2.5 Russian industry in 19 14 - how ‘modem’ was it?

Defeat in the Crimean War (1854-56) showed up Russia's backwardness in every
way, not least militarily and economically, and the lack of railways was a serious
handicap to the efficient movement of troops and supplies. It was the building of
a railway network that gave Russia its first great push towards industrialization.
At the end of the Crimean War there were only about 750 miles of track, and most
of that was between St Petersburg and Moscow. By 1885 the network had grown
to over 16,000 miles of track, by 1900 there were almost 30,000 miles and by 1914
the total was over 45,000 miles. Railway expansion on this scale stimulated the
demand for iron, steel, wood, coal and oil, for the manufacture of rails, locomo
tives, rolling stock and all the other necessary equipment. It was during the 1890s
that Russia's industrialization speeded up dramatically in what has been described
as the ‘great spurt'.
(a) W itte and the ‘great spurt’

Count Sergei Witte (1849-1915), along with Petr Stolypin, was among the few
really able ministers appointed by Nicholas II. From 1892 until 1903 Witte held
leading positions - first as Transport Minister and then as Finance Minister.
He believed that if Russia was to keep its place among the world’s leading
powers, both economically and militarily, it was vital to modernize. He felt this
was too important for initiatives to be left to businessmen - the government
must play a part. Witte did everything he could to encourage industry and bank
ing; he used government money to subsidize expansion and arranged loans and
investments from abroad. One estimate puts foreign investment in Russian
industry at 200 million roubles in 1890 and over 900 million in 1900; by that time
about 45 per cent of capital in Russian industrial enterprises had been invested
by foreigners. He increased exports, limited imports by imposing a tariff, bal
anced the budget, and put the rouble on the gold standard; this made the rouble
exchangeable for gold, kept the Russian currency at a high value, and provided
more security for foreign investors. He also put heavy taxes on items of everyday
consumption, forcing the peasants to play a large part in financing industrial
development; and without the peasants who moved into the towns to provide
the new labour force, the ‘great spurt’ would not have been possible. Foreign
experts were invited in to provide the necessary expertise - there were engineers
and advisers from Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and Belgium, all bringing
their Western ideas and skills.
Much of the investment went into railways - Witte's great brainchild was
the Trans-Siberian Railway linking Moscow to Vladivostock, nearly 4000 miles

away on the Pacific. Armaments factories were another priority and so was the
metallurgy industry. By 1900 there were eight main industrial areas. The
St Petersburg region specialized in textiles, iron and steel production and
machine building; Moscow produced textiles, iron and steel, and chemicals. In
the west, the Polish centres of Warsaw and Lodz produced textiles, coal, iron and
chemicals, while the Donbass area of the Ukraine supplied coal, iron ore and
chemicals. The Urals produced iron and various minerals, and the Baku region in
Transcaucasia had oilfields developed and expanded by Alfred Nobel. Transcau
casia also produced coal and manganese, and finally the area south of Kiev
specialized in beet-sugar processing.
The rapid expansion of the Russian economy in the 1890s was to some extent
part of a worldwide industrial boom. In 1900 when an international trade reces
sion began, Russia felt the effects, and the growth rate slowed down. The result
ing unemployment and wage reductions helped to cause unrest in the industrial
towns and cities which contributed towards the 1905 revolution. From 1909 the
economy picked up again and industrial production continued to increase until
the outbreak of war in 1914.
(b) How healthy was Russian industry in 1914?

This is a question which has caused some debate among historians and economists.
As with agriculture, there is a problem with statistics - these tend to be available
only for large- and medium-scale industries, and very few exist for small work
shops and handicrafts, which still employed about two-thirds of all industrial
workers in 1914. This hasn’t prevented historians from carrying out various com
plex calculations which have led them to reach contradictory conclusions; there
is, in fact, a pessimistic and an optimistic view of Russian industrial potential.
The pessimistic view which was held by most Soviet historians is based on
statistics of production of the leading world powers in 1914, in million tons (elec
tricity in millio n kilowatts) : N
Coal Iron Steel Oil Electricity

(million kW)
Russia 36.2 3.6 4.1 10.3 2.0
USA 455.0 30.0 32.0 34.0 25.8
Britain 292.0 11.0 6.5 4.7
Germany 277.0 14.7 14.0
Austria-Hungary 47.0 2.0 2.7
Clearly Russia was lagging well behind her main rivals, apart from Austria-
Hungary; oil output was disappointing because in 1900 Russia had been the
world’s leading oil producer.23
But it wasn’t only Soviet historians who give this rather discouraging view; the
Frenchman Bairoch and the Russian-American economic historian S.N. Prokop
ovich reached similar conclusions from their calculations. Bairoch showed that
Russia had even fallen behind Italy, not in total production, but in production
per head of the population, in other Words in efficiency. Prokopovich looked
42 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rüsèian History

at national incomes and came to the conclusion that Russia had the lowest
percentage increase and the lowest national income per head of all the main
European countries. Raymond Goldsmith, an American economist, concluded
that Russia's real income per head had been relatively higher in 1860 than it was
in 1913, in comparison with the USA and Japan, although he also calculated that
Russia's growth rate of industrial output was higher than that of the USA and
Germany at about 5 per cent per annum between 1888 and 1913. However, Rus
sia’s starting point was so low that she was still a long way behind. The general
conclusion of the pessimists is that given Russia’s vast natural resources, she
should have been closing the gap much more quickly. In fact Bairoch’s figures
suggest that the gap in productive capacity was actually widening.
The optimistic view is taken by a number of Western historians, including two
British writers, Paul R. Gregory and M.E. Falkus. They both make the point that
Bairoch's per capita basis was flawed because he included agricultural workers in
the general calculation instead of treating them separately. In view of Russia’s
special circumstances - a much larger proportion of the population engaged in
agriculture than anywhere else in Europe, plus the fact that their productivity
was low - Bairoch’s method of calculation made Russian industrial workers
appear far less efficient than they actually were. They believe that if the average
growth rates of the period 1890-1913 had continued over the next 50 years, the
Russian people would have been leading a reasonably comfortable existence.
Alexander Gerschenkron, another Russian-American economist, took a similar
view: although he admitted that Russia was still relatively backward ‘by any
quantitative criterion’, he saw many encouraging signs: the increasingly modem
attitudes of Russian businessmen, an improvement in the economic conditions
of the workforce, and the reduced importance of foreign engineers and managers.
He felt that the great industrial expansion in the years 1908-14 was duplicating
what had happened in Germany 20 or 30 years earlier. ‘One might surmise,’ he
wrote, ‘that in the absence of the war Russia would have continued on the road
of progressive westernization.’24A French economist, Edmond Thery, writing in
1912, forecast that if Russia could maintain until 1950 the same rate of economic
growth which had occurred since 1900, she would have dominated Europe eco
nomically, politically and financially.
For a sensible and balanced conclusion it is best to turn to Alec Nove,25 prob
ably the most outstanding recent British expert on the economy of Russia and
the USSR. He came to the conclusion that Russia was making clear industrial
progress, but that it was uneven. The newest developments were very advanced
indeed, since the Russians were able to take advantage of Western experience
and go straight for the most up-to-date techniques and equipment in large fac
tories. Most of these were concentrated in the St Petersburg and Moscow areas,
and in Poland and the Ukraine. However, most of the industry in the rest of the
country consisted of small workshops; on the whole, the fiirther south and east
you went, the more primitive the industry became. Nove has some telling statis
tics: in 1915 about 67 per cent of industrial workers (5.2 million people) worked
in these small-scale workshops, but they only produced 33 per cent of total
industrial output. This means that their output per head was only a quarter of
that produced by workers in large-scale industry.

There were other vital weaknesses töo: engineering made only limited progress;
this was serious because it meant that a large proportion of industrial equip
ment, tools and machinery had to be imported, a lot of it from Germany, while
much agricultural equipment came from the USA. Worst of all, it meant that
when the First World War started, Russia was soon short of armaments. In
addition the Russians were still short of capital, which left them dependent on
foreign investment. Finally the weakness which even the optimistic Gerschenkron
commented on, began to make itself felt again - industrialization was itself a
threat to political stability, and without political stability, investment would be
discouraged and successful industrial advance could not continue. From 1910
onwards full employment meant that the workers, who were still poorly paid and
exploited, were able to pressurize employers more. There was an increase in
strikes culminating in August 1912 in the shooting of some miners in the Lena
goldfields. This was a dangerous mixture: industrial and social unrest soon turned
into political unrest.
2.6 The political system after 1905 - the Duma

experiment
(a) Nicholas and the Fundamental Laws
To the outsider the October Manifesto might well have suggested that Russia had
set out on the path towards liberalism and democracy; democratic institutions
had been set up, and political parties and trade unions were legal. Liberal histor
ians have talked about ‘the experiment in democracy’ and ‘the constitutional
experiment’ which might have saved the monarchy if only Nicholas and the
Dumas could have worked together. But the problem was that the Tsar and his
circle had no intention of co-operating with the Duma.26 His main concern was
to see how many of the concessions he could withdraw, how much of his auto
cratic power he could claw back, without actually provoking another revolution.
In the Fundamental Laws announced in April 1906, when the elections for the
first Duma were in progress, Nicholas restated that ‘supreme autocratic power is
vested in the Tsar of all the Russias. It is God’s command that his authority
should be obeyed.’ The word ‘constitution’ was carefully not mentioned. The
Duma (or State Assembly) was to have two houses:•
• The State Council - this was an upper house; half its members were to be
appointed by the Tsar and the rest elected by various privileged groups such
as landowners, gentry, industrialists and clergy, all members were responsible
only to the Tsar, and the Council had the power of veto over the other house.
• The State Duma - this was an elected body with very limited powers. No law
could be passed without the approval of the Tsar. Although it was stated that
the Duma had to approve the annual budget, in reality all expenditure on the
army, navy, imperial court, and questions of state loans and debts, which
amounted to almost 40 per cent of the total budget, were exempt from the
Duma’s scrutiny. The voting system was not the democratic one which liberals
44 Mastering Twentieth-Century Ryssjan History

and socialists had hoped for, in which everybody had a direct vote and all
votes carried equal weight. Instead it was decided to have a system of indirect
votes by estates, in order to reduce the numbers of radical members likely to
be elected. The ordinary voter would cast his vote, not directly for members of
the Duma, but for members of an electoral college, and it was these who in
turn selected the Duma members. There were four electoral colleges: gentry,
burghers (town property-owners), peasants and workers. The franchise was
fixed so that one gentry vote was the equivalent of three burgher, fifteen
peasant and forty-five worker votes.
In addition to all this, the Tsar kept the right to appoint ministers, to declare war
and make peace, and to dissolve the Duma whenever he felt like it. When the
Duma was not in session the Tsar could issue whatever emergency laws were felt
to be necessary (this was Article 87). At least the Duma did have two important
rights: in certain circumstances it was allowed to question ministers, and mem
bers were allowed free speech. According to American historian Richard Pipes,
‘this provided a forum for unrestrained and often intemperate criticism of the
regime/ He suggests that this probably contributed more to undermining the
prestige of the government in the eyes of the general public than all the revolu
tionary outrages, because it destroyed the impression, which it struggled very
hard to maintain, that it was in complete control of the situation.27
(b) Nicholas and the Dumas

There were four Dumas, the first two (April-June 1906 and February-June 1907)
both had centre-left majorities and were soon dismissed by Nicholas. The
franchise was changed after the second Duma, reducing the representation of
the lower classes. Consequently the Dumas were less troublesome; the third
(1907-12) lasted for its full term of five years, while the fourth was dissolved after
just over four years. The four elections produced the following results, though it
has to be remembered that some of the 'parties’ were loosely organized groups;
for this reason almost every source gives slightly different figures:
Party or group FirstDuma SecondDuma Third Duma Fourth Duma

1906 1907 1907-12 1912-17
Kadets 182 91 54 53
Trudoviki 136 104 13 10
Octobrists 17 42 154 95
Mensheviks 18 47 - -
Bolsheviks - - 19 15
SRs - 37 - -
Non-Russians 60 93 26 22
Progressists 27 28 28 41
Rightists 8 10 147 154
Others - 50 - 42
448 502 441 432

Kadets (Constitutional Democrats): the moderate or radical liberals who were
bitterly disappointed with the October Manifesto; they wanted genuine universal
suffrage and a strict limitation on the powers of the Tsar. They were so successful
in 1906 because the SRs and the Social Democrats (Mensheviks and Bolsheviks)
largely boycotted the elections. For instance the Kadets won all the seats in St
Petersburg and Moscow, thanks to the votes of the workers, some of which would
have gone to the Social Democrats if they had put up candidates.
Trudoviki (labour group): a left-wing group, mainly small peasant farmers with
some middle class members - lawyers and teachers. Many of them would have
stood as Socialist Revolutionaries if the party had fought the election.
Octobrists: these were the conservative or right-of-centre liberals who had

welcomed the October Manifesto.
Non-Russians: mainly Poles, with some Lithuanians, Latvians and Ukrainians.
Progressists: an elite group of businessmen who were in favour of moderate reform.
Rightists: not an organized party - they represented a wide range of conservative

views.
The First Duma, April-June 1906

The election was a triumph for the Kadets and other left-wing groups which had
a clear majority. It was a bitter disappointment for Nicholas and especially for
Witte, who had assured the Tsar that the revolutionaries and radicals had no
mass support and that the peasants would vote for conservative candidates (see
Documents E-H). Witte was now viewed by the court as a dangerous radical and
was replaced as chief minister by Ivan Goremykin, an old-fashioned reactionary
conservative.
From the beginning the deputies were in a militant mood and made far-reach
ing demands: an amnesty for political prisoners, abolition of the death penalty,
abolition of the upper house, the resignation of Nicholas’s ministers, a fully
democratic electoral system, a fairer tax system and the right to strike. Most
important of all was the question of land reform - the redistribution of surplus
gentry land among the peasants. Goremykin rejected all these demands and after
ten weeks of bitter argument the Tsar decided to dissolve the Duma. The Tauride
Palace, where it met, was surrounded by troops and the deputies were forced to
disperse. In protest about 200 Kadets and left-wing deputies crossed the border
into Finland and met in the town of Vyborg. From there they issued what they
called the Vyborg Manifesto, condemning the government’s action and calling on
people to refuse to pay taxes and to do military service. However, there was very
little response from ordinary people; many of the Kadets were arrested and
barred from Duma membership. They felt let down by the masses and from then
on gradually became less radical. Petr Stolypin was appointed chief minister and
he soon introduced a policy of repressions restore order.

The Second Duma, February-June 1907
The main change was that the Kadets lost half their seats, probably because the
Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries decided to take part in the
election, and because the Kadets were now seen as ineffectual - not radical
enough for workers and peasants but too radical for conservatively-minded
liberals. The membership of the Second Duma was more polarized than before;
the revolutionary SDs and SRs had 84 seats between them and since the national
minorities always voted with the opposition, the left-wing groups still had a small
majority. The proceedings were acrimonious and disorderly, and although
Stolypin tried to work with the Duma, the majority opposed his agrarian reforms
(see section 2.4(a)). When the secret police claimed to have found evidence of an
SD plot to assassinate the Tsar, Stolypin took the opportunity to have the Second
Duma dissolved. The very next day a new electoral system was announced which
drastically reduced the representation of the workers, peasants and national
minorities. This was a breach of the Tsar’s own Fundamental Laws; it meant that
only about one in six men had the vote, and that peasants and workers were more
or less excluded. In addition, trade unions were banned again, and anybody who
tried to form any kind of workers’ organization or call a strike was liable to be
arrested.
The Third Duma, 1907-12

As the statistics show, the electoral changes produced a Duma with a large right-
wing majority. At first relations between the Duma and the government went
smoothly, but in 1909 things began to go wrong for Stolypin. There was opposi
tion to his proposal to build four new battleships; in 1911 when he proposed to
extend the zemstva to the western areas of the empire, his bill was defeated in the
upper house - the State Council. The main reason for this was that his right-wing
opponents were becoming jealous of his success: his repressive policies had
restored order and his agrarian reforms seemed to be going well. In the eyes of
reactionaries, he had outlived his usefulness, and this was the perfect opportunity
to get rid of him before he introduced any more drastic reforms. Stolypin threat
ened to resign unless Nicholas suspended the Duma temporarily and passed the
bill as an emergency measure under Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws. The
Tsar agreed, but Stolypin’s victory did him no goód. The Tsar felt humiliated at
having to act against his right-wing supporters in the State Council, and the
Octobrists were outraged at what they saw as his abuse of Article 87.
It may be that Nicholas would have sacked him quite soon; however, on 1 Sep
tember 1911, during a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Legend of
Tsar Sultan in Kiev, in the presence of Nicholas and his four daughters, Stolypin
was shot by a revolutionary who was also acting as a police informer. He died
a few days later in hospital There were rumours that the secret police, and per
haps even the Tsar himself, had connived at Stolypin’s murder, but nothing was
ever proved. Some historians have argued that his death removed the mon
archy’s last chance of survival, but it is clear that Stolypin's days of political influ
ence were numbered anyway. The very people he was trying to save had already
fatally undermined him.
The Fourth Duma, 1912-17
After the death of Stolypin the government seemed to abandon all ideas of
reform and fell back on a policy of repression and reliance on reactionary sup
port. Even the Fourth Duma with its centre-right majority became increasingly
critical of the government; but the government for the most part simply ignored
the Duma, and by 1914 its influence was in decline. As Alexander Guchkov, the
Octobrist leader, told the party conference in 1913:
‘The attempt made by the Russian public, as represented by our party, to

effect a peaceful, painless transition from the old condemned system to a
new order has failed. Let those in power make no mistake about the temper
of the people; never were the Russian people so profoundly revolutionized
by the actions of the government, for day by day faith in the government is
steadily waning, and with it is waning faith in the possibility of a peaceful
issue of the crisis.’
(c) Why did the Duma experiment fail?

It ought to have been possible with a little compromise on both sides to develop
a workable conservative-liberal partnership that might even have saved the
monarchy. However, Nicholas was obsessed with keeping the autocracy intact,
and lacked the imagination or the vision to see the advantages of sharing at least
some of his power with the parliament; it would have meant for example that
some of the criticism and hostility which fell solely on him would have been
directed against the Duma. ‘I have no intention,’ he remarked, ‘of renouncing
what was bequeathed to me by my forefathers and which I must hand down
unimpaired to my son.’ He and most of his ministers refused to admit that there
was a mass movement against them: in January 1906 the Foreign Minister, Count
Lamsdorf, argued in a secret memorandum that the events of 1905 had been
promoted ‘by the Jews of all countries; the revolutionary movement is being
actively supported and partly directed by the forces of universal Jewry.’ Nicholas
himself added the comment: T share entirely the sentiments herein expressed.’28
He had no intention of trying to co-operate with the Duma and was always
looking for an excuse to get rid of it. Of the second Duma he remarked: ‘We must
let them do something manifestly stupid or mean, and then - slap - and they are
gone!’ He was convinced that the Duma would be less able to cope with the
complex problems facing the Russian empire than he and his advisers.
On the other hand the Duma members were just as reluctant to compromise.
They went on the attack from the first day, and played into the Tsar’s hands by
demanding too much all at once. Paul Milyukov, leader of the Kadets, demanded
that the Tsar should accept their entire programme and call a Constituent
Assembly. Mackenzie Wallace, an Englishman who knew Russia well, advised the
Kadets to be more patient and take things gradually, allowing democracy to
develop step by step over the next eight to ten years. ‘In England,' he pointed out,
‘it took us a century to arrive at a parliamentary monarchy.’ ‘Eight to ten years is
48 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rifesikn History

much too long,’ replied the Kadet leader. *We shall never wait so long as that/29
And so within the first few days the Duma became a battleground between the
autocracy and the liberals, and all possibility of trust was lost.
2.7 Was the collapse of Tsarism inevitable

by 1914?
This is one of those perennially fascinating questions to which it is difficult to
provide a definitive answer, but that hasn’t prevented historians from speculat
ing endlessly about it. The Soviet view was based on the Marxist theory that the
collapse of the tsarist regime would be the inevitable completion of the ‘unfin
ished’ revolution of 1905-6. The traditional liberal view was that although the
regime had obvious and glaring weaknesses in early 1914, it also had a number of
strengths. Things were basically improving, and the monarchy would probably
have survived if Russia could have kept out of the First World War. The recent
revisionist research challenges both these views.
(a) Strengths of the regime

The government seemed to recover remarkably quickly from the 1905 revolution
with most of its powers intact. Thanks to Stolypin’s repressive policies, order was
restored. One contemporary source estimated that from the time Stolypin
became chief minister in 1906 until the end of 1909, almost 4000 people were
executed and a further 4000 sentenced to hard labour. Stolypin was unpopular
with the masses - the noose was nicknamed ‘Stolypin’s necktie' - but his mea
sures were effective. The secret police had some remarkable successes infiltrating
revolutionary groups: Evno Azef, who until 1908 was leader of the fighting
section of the SRs, was at the same time a police agent. Roman Malinovski was
a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and was elected as a Bolshevik
deputy in the Duma in 1912; but he was also a police spy; he was the man
responsible for Stalin’s arrest and exile to Siberia in 1913. Hundreds of radical
newspapers were closed down, together with many of the newly legalized trade
unions which tried to assert themselves. Leon Trotsky, writing about the years
1907-11, observed that ‘factories which two or three years ago would strike
unanimously over some single arbitrary police action, today have completely lost
their revolutionary colour, and accept the most monstrous crimes of the author
ities without resistance. Great defeats discourage people for a long time. The
consciously revolutionary elements lose their power over the masses.'30 So the
situation seemed to be under tight control; in August 1907 Stolypin told a French
newspaper reporter: ‘In Russia there is no revolution whatever.’
Stolypin combined his repression with reforms designed to improve life for the
masses. The zemstva, encouraged and helped by the government, introduced
extensive improvements in public health and a system of health insurance for
workers. In 1908 a programme was announced to bring about compulsory uni
versal education within ten years. By 1914 an extra 50,000 primary schools had

been opened, mainly organized by the zemstva. Most important of all, Stolypin’s
agrarian reforms seemed to be working well until 1911. Lenin was certainly worried
by their success; ‘if this should continue for long periods of time/ he wrote in 1908,
‘it might force us to renounce any agrarian programme at all.’ By 1909 the economy
was booming again and there was plenty of evidence to support Gerschenkron’s
optimistic forecast for future economic development (see section 2.5(b)).
Stability depended on the industrial workers and peasants. Richard Pipes argues
that no revolution was possible in Russia as long as the rural areas were quiet and
calm. He believes that there were no stirrings in the villages either immediately
before the war or in the first two years after it began. True, there were half a
million workers on strike in 1912, but they were only a tiny minority compared
with the 100 million peasants who quietly got on with their business. Pipes
argues that the fact that the workers were on strike was a sign that they were pro
gressing to a more advanced economic and social status, since poorly paid and
downtrodden labourers haveTittle stomach for going on strike. The strikes were
a symptom of the growing maturity of the Russian industrial worker, and judging
by Western experience, this would lead in time to greater social stability.31
The opposition parties were less militant: a large section of the Kadets had
drifted towards the right, while the Social Democrats' membership was falling
and their leaders were in exile, scattered all over Europe. Some of the Bolsheviks’
tactics made them unpopular: Lenin was against co-operating with trade unions
because he claimed they were not capable of developing a revolutionary con
sciousness (see section 2.2(f)). The Bolshevik practice of robbing banks to augment
funds, and stealing arms and ammunition caused something of a scandal. In fact
some Social Democrats, especially Mensheviks, were saying that Lenin was
finished - he was a man with no political future.
Finally the monarchy seemed to be strengthening itself by encouraging
right-wing groups such as the Russian Monarchist Party, the Russian Assembly
and the Union of the Russian People (URP). By far the most influential was the
URP which wanted to preserve the full apparatus of the autocracy\and full
Russian control of the empire. URP members hated all political parties and the
intelligentsia because they were thought to stand in the way of ‘the direct com
munion between the Tsar and his people’. The URP blamed Jews, non-Russians,
non-Orthodox Christians and Muslims for all the problems facing Russia. Their
membership included all sorts of people - such as small craftsmen and shop
keepers - who felt threatened by the recent changes and reforms, and they
believed that the Tsar was not being decisive enough in his actions against the
revolutionaries. They organized paramilitary groups known as Black Hundreds
whose aim was to give revolutionary terrorists a taste of their own medicine. By
the end of 1906 the URP had taken off in a big way with over a thousand branches
throughout the country. The government, delighted at this new support, gave the
movement financial assistance. Street violence became commonplace; the Black
Hundreds beat up students, radicals, Roman Catholics, anyone suspected of
having left-wing opinions, and above all Jews.
The treatment meted out to Jews was appalling - pogroms took place all over
Russia: 800 Jews were murdered in Odessa, and whenever any terrorist violence
occurred it was always the Jews who were blamed. Nicholas himself wentalong
50 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rifesiàn History

with this attitude, claiming that nine-tenths of the trouble-makers were Jews.
The most notorious case took place in Kiev where, in 1911, the body of a 13-year
old Orthodox Christian boy was found stabbed to death. Mendel Beiliss, a com
pletely innocent Jewish clerk, was arrested and tried on a charge of ritual murder.
Although two policemen had discovered the real murderers, the trial went ahead
and the two policemen were sacked. There was a huge outcry and demonstra
tions in support of Beiliss and the case aroused considerable interest abroad. In
the end he was acquitted, but it later emerged that the Tsar and the government
had gone to great lengths to secure a conviction, although they knew he was
innocent. Defence witnesses were arrested before the trial began and the judge
was bribed; and still the jury had the courage to reach a ‘not guilty’ verdict. The
regime was prepared to go to such disreputable lengths, ignoring international
condemnation, because they saw it as part of a quite legitimate counter-revolu
tionary campaign. Although the Beiliss case ended in defeat for the government,
the activities of the URP in general gave the impression that the monarchy was
rallying itself and fighting back successfully against the forces of revolution.
(b) Weaknesses of the regime

The key to the question of how close the Russian empire was to revolution in
1914 lies in the attitudes of the peasants and urban workers. By 1912 it was clear
that the Stolypin agrarian reforms were not working in the way he had hoped
(see section 2.4(b)). Though Richard Pipes claims that the villages were quiet
immediately before the war, revisionist historians would point out that this does
not necessarily mean that the peasants felt no resentment or hostility. Following
the Stolypin repression, when villages were burned down and hundreds of peas
ants hanged after summary trials in field courts, it is not altogether surprising
that they were docile. There is ample evidence that peasants still had their minds
firmly fixed on two goals: land and freedom. The American historian Leopold
Haimson argued that it was those peasants who moved into towns and cities to
work in industry who caused the most problems for the regime by fiielling the
existing unrest. He calculated that in 1914 about 50 per cent of industrial workers
in St Petersburg had moved in from the countryside comparatively recently.
Many of them were full of resentment, not only against the landowning gentry,
but against those successful peasants who had left the commune.32 Haimson
claimed that these workers were very much attracted to Bolshevik and anarchist
ideas with their simple, emotional slogans, and that they found the SRs and
Mensheviks too moderate (see Document J).
By 1912 there was growing unrest in industrial towns and cities. Living and
working conditions had probably improved marginally since 1905, and a class of
better-off, skilled workers had emerged. But it was exactly these people who were
susceptible to revolutionary ideas and propaganda and who were likely to become
the spearhead of any revolution. The statistics of strikes tell a significant story.
The upsurge in strikes was mainly a response to the regime's handling of
a goldminers' strike in the Lena River area near Yakutsk in Siberia. In February
1912 about five thousand goldminers went on strike for purely economic reasons.
They felt themselves to be unreasonably exploited, having to work extremely

Year Strikes Workers involved Politically
motivated
----------------------
1910 222 46,000 8
1911 466 105,000 24
1912 2032 725,491 1300
1913 (first 8 months) 1671 figure not avail 761
able
1914 (first 7 months) 3466 over one million 2500
Statistics from Lionel Kochan, Russia in Revolution, pp. 154-5.
long hours, sometimes from 5 am until 7 pm; wages were poor and paid on the
truck system. They asked for a maximum eight-hour day and higher wages to be
paid in cash; they made no political demands. After a month no agreement had
been reached and the government decided to use troops to force the miners back
to work; clashes developed and about 200 workers were killed and hundreds of
others wounded. There was uproar when news of the Lena massacre reached
St Petersburg; by the end of April half a million workers came out on strike in
sympathy, and there was a great international outcry. By its own short-sighted
reaction, the regime had unnecessarily provoked a political protest which it fol
lowed up by banning the militant unions. This of course only drove them under
ground again and increased the bitterness. The strike wave continued through
1913 and into 1914. Matters were made worse by an outbreak of plague in the Baku
oilfields on the Caspian Sea, where living and working conditions were primitive.
In June 1914 there was a general strike in the Baku area; again troops were
brought in and again protests spread to St Petersburg. Two workers at the Putilov
steelworks were killed by police, and within a few days there was a general strike
in the capital. It seemed like a repeat performance of 1905, with the authorities
apparently having learned nothing in the meantime. This time, howeyer, there
were more far-reaching political demands including a democratic republic.
Another threat to the regime was the revival of the revolutionary movements,
especially the Bolsheviks. They did not begin the unrest, but once it began to
surface again in 1912 they certainly used all their skills to organize and direct it.
The Bolshevik daily newspaper Pravda was published openly from 1912 and
reached sales of40,000 a day. A small group of Bolshevik deputies was elected to
the Duma in 1912 and in August 1913 the Bolsheviks gained control of the Metal
workers’ Union, the biggest one in St Petersburg. By 1914 they had won control
of all the major trade unions in St Petersburg and Moscow.
The regime’s extreme Russian nationalist and anti-Jewish policy turned out to
be counter-productive. Instead of making some concessions to win the support
of the non-Russians - for example the Polish language could have been allowed -
the government continued its policy of ‘Russification’- trying to make the Russian
language and the Orthodox religion a unifying basis for the whole empire. All
efforts to establish separate national identities were suppressed, causing protests
from areas as far apart as Latvia and Georgia. By 1914 all the non-Russians were
strongly opposed to the regime, and since they made up over half the total

population of the empire, this was a serious threat to stability. One of the main
threats to the monarchy was in Poland where Josef Pilsudski and his Left Socialist
Party were training troops in Krakow (in the part of Poland controlled by Austria-
Hungary) and doing all they could to destabilize the part of Poland ruled by
Russia. This included co-operating with the Bolsheviks and with Lenin, who was
based in Krakow for a time in 1912 and 1913. The anti-Semitic policy was equally
short-sighted - the government persisted in treating Jews as an alien group at
a time when many young Jews were growing away from their religious and cul
tural origins and would have been quite prepared to become ‘good Russians’, given
half a chance. So it was no accident that many of the leading revolutionaries were
Jewish or non-Russian.
A serious weakness was the unpopularity of the royal family. Nicholas II was
a man of limited vision and narrow intellect who found it difficult to contemplate
any sort of change. True, his most recent biographer, Dominic Lieven, attempts
to defend him, describing him as intelligent and flexible, but his actions speak for
themselves. The more pressure built up for liberal reform, the more he fell back
on repression; he chose extreme reactionaries for his advisers and withdrew his
support from the only two politicians - Witte and Stolypin - who might have
been able to save the monarchy. He failed to grasp the possibilities opened up by
the creation of the Duma; he did everything in his power to sideline even the
third and fourth Dumas which had right-wing majorities, instead of trying to
enlist their support. By 1914 even the Octobrists were despairing of him; some of
them were now opposed to any suggestion of reconciliation with the regime (see
Documents I and K).
The family was further discredited by its association with Grigori Rasputin,33
a peasant ‘holy man’from Siberia who made himself indispensable to the Empress
Alexandra by his ability to help the unfortunate heir to the throne, Alexei (aged
10 in 1914), who suffered from haemophilia inherited from his mother’s family.
On occasion Rasputin was able, apparently by using a combination of prayer and
hypnosis, to stop the internal bleeding when Alexei suffered a haemorrhage.
Along-running scandal developed as rumours of Rasputin’s disreputable behav
iour spread. He was said to be a drunkard, a lecher who had endless affairs with
court ladies, including the Empress, and it was reported that he had an aristocratic
homosexual lover. It was also rumoured that he had an unhealthy influence on
government policy and could get ministers appointed and sacked. No doubt
much of this was exaggerated, but what mattered was that people believed the
rumours; and they brought respect for the monarchy to an all-time low. When
the Duma requested that Rasputin should be sent away from the court, Nicholas
refused, arguing that it was a family matter.
To be fair to Nicholas, it wasn't his fault that he inherited such a complex set of
problems - a huge empire in the throes of industrialization and modernization,
with an inadequate administrative system, and a population of peasants, work
ers and an intelligentsia who felt alienated from the ruling elite. The interna
tional situation was not promising: the Russian Empire felt threatened by its
neighbours - Germany, Austria-Hungary and Japan - and its armed forces, though
large, were not well-equipped. This was a set of circumstances which would have
severely stretched whatever government happened to be in power. Even so,

different policy decisions could have been made; a more imaginative, less naive
Tsar might have followed different advice and avoided Nicholas’s worst mis
takes. The danger was that after 20 years of rule by Nicholas and his advisers, all
the basic problems and tensions in the empire were still there.
(c) The verdict?

Judging by the evidence of the urban unrest and strikes, the revival of Bolshevik
activity, the unpopularity of the Tsar and his failure to learn any lessons from the
experiences of 1905, it does look as though events were moving towards another
upheaval in the summer of 1914, before the First World War started. It wasn’t only
in St Petersburg that disturbances were taking place - there was massive support
for change in other cities - Moscow, Kiev, Warsaw, Odessa, Tbilisi (Georgia), Riga
(Latvia) and Tallinn (Estonia). The autocracy was simply not equal to dealing
with all the complex problems*of a huge state in the process of modernization. If
the regime continued with its stubborn refusal to address the root causes of the
unrest, it is difficult to see how another revolution could have been avoided, even
without a war. Whether that would have happened in 1914 or later is impossible
to say. One significant point is that the Bolshevik Central Committee called off the
St Petersburg strike early in July 1914 because of lack of weapons and ’inadequate
party organization’. However, the workers continued the strike for another four
days, which suggests that the Bolsheviks had lost control of the movement; in
fact, according to a police report, the workers had ‘gone berserk’. All this seems
to support writers like George Kennan and Leopold Haimson who argued that the
regime would have collapsed sooner or later, war or no war. More recently, Sheila
Fitzpatrick takes a similar view: ‘The autocracy’s situation was precarious on the
eve of the First World War,’ she writes; ‘the society was deeply divided, and the
political and bureaucratic structure was fragile and overstrained. The regime was
so vulnerable to any kind of jolt or setback that it is hard to imagine that it could
have survived long, even without the war.'34 Soviet historians continuedN to argue
to the end that revolution was historically inevitable and that the ‘revolutionary
upsurge' was reaching a climax in 1914 - in their view the outbreak of war
actually delayed the revolution.
Other historians are more cautious. Christopher Read thinks that the over
throw of the monarchy was by no means inevitable and that the situation in the
years immediately before 1914 could have continued indefinitely.35 Robert
Service agrees, arguing that although ‘the various weaknesses of tsarism were
tightly interlinked, leaving the Russian Empire in a condition of general
brittleness,... a sense of proportion has to be maintained; although it was a
vulnerable plant, it was not doomed to undergo the root-and-branch revolution
of 1917. What made that kind of revolution possible was the protracted,
exhausting conflict of the First World War.’36 Bearing in mind A.J.P. Taylor's
famous maxim that nothing is ever inevitable until it has started to happen, per
haps the best conclusion is that revolution was highly likely but not absolutely
inevitable. The regime’s ability to survive depended in the last resort on whether
the army remained loyal; on how long the soldiers would continue to obey
orders to shoot striking workers.

Documents
The 1905 Revolution
(A) An Austrian observer talks to a Russian official about the situation in 1904.
‘What will be the end, then?'

‘The end will be that the terror from above will awaken the terror from below,
that peasant revolts will break out and assassination will increase.’
‘And is there no possibility of organizing the revolution so that it shall not rage
senselessly?’
‘Impossible
‘There is no one with whom I have spoken who would fail to paint the future
of this country in the darkest colours. Can there be no change of the fatal
policy which is ruining the country?'
‘Not before a great general catastrophe. When we shall be compelled for the
first time partly to repudiate our debts - and that may happen sooner than we
may now believe - on that day, being no longer able to pay our old debts with
new ones - for we shall no longer be able to conceal our internal bankruptcy
from foreign countries and from the Emperor - steps will be taken, perhaps
‘Is there no mistake possible here in what you are saying?’
‘Whoever, like myself, has known the state kitchen for the last twenty-five
years has no longer any doubts. The autocracy is not equal to the problems of
a great modem power, and it would be against all historical precedent to
assume that it would voluntarily yield without external pressure to a constitu
tional form of government.’
‘We must wish then, for Russia's sake, that the catastrophe comes as quickly
as possible.’
'I repeat to you that it is perhaps nearer than we all think or are willing to
admit. That is the hope; that is our secret consolation... We are near to collapse,
like an athlete with great muscles and perhaps incurable heart weakness. We
still maintain ourselves upright by stimulants, by loans, which like all stimu
lants only help to min the system more quickly. With that we are a rich country
with all conceivable natural resources, simply ill-governed and prevented
from unlocking our resources. But is this the first time that quacks have
ruined a Hercules that has fallen into their hands?'
Source: Hugo Ganz, The Downfall of Russia, quoted in A. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR,
1917-1991, third edition, 1992, pp. 18-19.
(B) Extracts from the Petition of the Workers, Bloody Sunday, 9 January 1905.
Sire: we working men and inhabitants of St Petersburg come to Thee, Sire, to

seek for truth and defence. We have become beggars; we have been
{continued)

oppressed; we are treated as slaves. The limit of patience has been reached.
There has arrived for us that tremendous moment when death is better than
the continuation of intolerable tortures. We have left off working and we have
declared to the masters that we shall not begin to work until they comply with
our demands. We beg but little... The first request was that our masters
should discuss our needs with us, but this was refused, on the grounds that by
law we have no right to make such a request. They also declared to be illegal
our requests to reduce the working hours to eight hours daily, to agree with us
about the prices for our work, and to increase the wages of women and
general labourers__ Every one of our requests was a crime, and the desire to
improve our condition was regarded by them as impertinence.
Sire, here are many thousands of us, but we are human beings in appear
ance only; there is no human right, not even the right of speaking, thinking,
meeting, discussing our needs. Every one of us who dares to raise a voice in
defence of working class antipopular interests is thrown in gaol or is sent into
banishment... We are seeking here the last salvation. Do not refuse assistance
to Thy people... order immediately the convocation of representatives of the
Russian land from all ranks, including the working people... This is the most
capital of our requests.
[Then follows a list of requests for measures to counteract the ignorance and
legal oppression, the poverty and the oppression of the Russian people]
Order these requests and Thou wilt make Russia happy and famous and
Thou wilt impress thy name in our hearts. If Thou wilt not answer our prayers -
we shall die here on this place before Thy palace...
Source: quoted in GA Kertesz (ed.), Documents in the Political History of the European Continent,
1815-1939, OUP, 1968, p. 297.
(C) Two eyewitness accounts of Bloody Sunday.
The dragoon circled round him [the worker] and, shrieking like a woman,
waved his sabre in the air... Swooping down from his dancing horse, he
slashed him across the face, cutting him open from the eyes to the chin.
I remember the strangely enlarged eyes of the worker and the murderer’s
face, blushed from the cold and excitement, his teeth clenched in a grin and
the hairs of his moustache standing up on his elevated lip. Brandishing his
tarnished shaft of steel he let out another shriek and, with a wheeze, spat at
the dead man through his teeth, [by Maxim Gorky, a writer and Bolshevik
sympathiser].
I observed the faces round me and I detected neither fear nor panic. No, the
reverend and almost prayerful expressions were replaced by hostility and
even hatred. I saw these looks of hatred and vengeance on literally every face -
old and young, men and women. The revolution had been truly bom, and it
had been bom in the very core, in the very bowels of the people. An old man
56 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rutsiân History

turned to a young boy and said: ‘Remember son, remember and swear to
repay the Tsar. You saw how much blood he spilled, did you see? Then swear,
son, swear!'
[written by a Bolshevik in the crowd]
Source: quoted in Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy, the Russian Revolution 1891-1924, 1996,
pp. 177-8.
(D) The St Petersburg Soviet, October-December 1905; two proclamations.
20 October [following the announcement of the October Manifesto):

In view of the necessity of the working class to organize on the basis of its
achieved victories and to arm for a final struggle for a Constituent Assembly
on the basis of universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage which is to establish
a democratic republic, the Council of Workers' Delegates orders that the polit
ical strike be stopped at noon, 21 October. The Council is confident, however,
that, should it be required by further developments, the working-men wifi
resume the strike as willingly and devotedly as heretofore.
1 November, call for a general strike in support of the rebellion of sailors at

Kronstadt.
The government continues to stride over corpses. It puts on trial before a
court-martial the brave Kronstadt soldiers of the army and navy who rose to
the defence of their rights and of national freedom. It put the noose of martial
law on the neck of oppressed Poland. The Council of Workers' Delegates calls
on the revolutionary proletariat of Petersburg to manifest their solidarity with
the revolutionary soldiers of Kronstadt and with the revolutionary proletarians
of Poland through a general political strike, which has proved to be a formidable
power, and through general meetings of protest. Tomorrow, on 2 November,
at noon, the working-men of Petersburg will stop work, their slogans being:
Down with court-martial! Down with capital punishment! Down with martial
law in Poland and all over Russia!
Source• quoted in R. Wolfson, Years of Change, 1890-1945, pp. 120-1.
The Duma
(E) Count Kokovtsov, the Minister of Finance describes the opening of the First
Duma.
St Georges' Hall, the throne room, presented a queer spectacle at this moment,
and I believe its walls had never before witnessed such a scene. The entire
right side of the room was filled with uniformed people, members of the State
Council and the Tsar’s retinue. The left side was crowded with the members
(icontinued)

of the Duma... the overwhelming'majority of which, occupying the first
places near the throne, were dressed as if intentionally in workers’ blouses
and cottön shirts, and behind them was a crowd of peasants in the most
varied costumes, some in national dress, and a multitude of representatives of
the clergy. The first place among these people’s representatives was occupied
by a man of tall stature, dressed in a worker’s blouse and high, oiled boots,
who examined the throne and those about it with a derisive and insolent air.
It was the famous F.M. Onipko, who later won great renown by his bold state
ments in the Duma. While the Tsar read his speech, I could not take my eyes
off Onipko, so much contempt and hate did his insolent face show. I was not
the only one who was thus impressed. Near me stood PA. Stolypin, who
turned to me and said: 'We both seem to be engrossed in the same spectacle.
I even have a feeling that this man might throw a bomb.’
Source: quoted in M. Ferro, Nicholas-Il, The Last of the Tsars, p. 109.
(F) Sergei Kryzhanovski, an official in the Ministry of the Interior, gives his
impression of the First Duma.
It was enough to take a look at the motley mob of ‘deputies’ - and it was my
lot to spend among them entire days in the corridors of Taurida Palace - to
experience horror at the sight of Russia’s first representative body. It was a
gathering of savages. It seemed as if the Russian land had sent to St Petersburg
everything that was barbarian in it, everything filled with envy and mahee.
The attempt to found the political system on the will of the people was clearly
doomed to failure because in this mass, any consciousness of statehood,
let alone of shared statehood, was totally submerged in social hostility and
class envy.
Source: quoted in R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919,1997 edition, pp. 162-3.
(G) Maurice Baring, an English expert in Russian literature, describes his visit to
a session of the Duma on 14 May 1906.
I had the good fortune to gain admission to the Duma yesterday afternoon.
I think it is the most interesting sight I have ever seen. One saw peasants in
their long black coats, some of them wearing military medals and crosses;
priests; Tartars; Poles, men in every kind of dress except uniform. When the
sitting began I went up to the gallery... The President, CA. Muromtsev, strikes
one as dignity itself. He exercises his functions with perfect serenity and
absolute fairness... The speeches were moderate; what struck me most in the
speeches I heard was the naturalness of their tone, and the absence of
declamatory emphasis. Several of the Speeches were eloquent; only one was
58 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rtisàian History

tedious. Nobody can possibly say the Duma is disorderly; it takes itself with
profound seriousness.
Source: quoted in R. Pethybridge, Witnesses to the Russian Revolution, 1964, pp. 50-4.
(H) Proclamation by the Tsar to dissolve the First Duma, 21 July 1906.
We summoned the representatives of the nation by Our will to the work of

productive legislation. We confidently anticipated benefits for the country
and We proposed great reforms in all departments in the national life.
A cruel disappointment has befallen Our expectations. The representatives
have strayed into spheres beyond their competence and have been making
comments on the imperfections of the Fundamental Laws which can only be
modified by Our imperial will. In short, the representatives of the nation have
undertaken really illegal acts, such as the appeal by the Duma to the nation.
We shall not permit arbitrary or illegal acts, and We shall impose Our imperial
will on the disobedient by all the power of the State.
Source: quoted in Wolfson, p. 122.
The situation on the eve of the First World W ar

(I) Rodzianko, the Octobrist President of the Duma, has an audience with the
Tsar in 1913. He complains that, in effect, Russia has no government. Extracts
from Rodzianko’s Memoirs, published in 1927.
‘What do you mean - no government?’

‘We are accustomed to think that part of the executive power of the crown is
delegated to the ministers and to the nominated members of the council of the
empire (state council). These latter execute the will of the government and
defend it in the legislative assembly. We, the members of the lower chamber,
are accustomed to think so. What do we see? During the last session we debated
the bill for the admittance of the Polish language in the schools of the western
provinces. It was your imperial majesty’s wish that the language should be
admitted in order to improve the position of the Poles by comparison with their
position in Austria, and so enlist their sympathies on behalf of Russia.’
‘Yes,’ replied the Tsar, ‘that is just what I had in view.'
‘So we understood it, and the bill was worked out in the Duma in that sense.
Now this bill is being debated in the council of the empire, and its leading prin
ciple is defended by a representative of the government. Meanwhile some of
the nominated members of the council are absent, others vote against it, and
the bill is rejected. Your majesty will agree that the members of the government
either do not wish to execute your will, or do not take the trouble to understand
0continued)

it. The population does not know where it is. Each minister has his own opinion.
The cabinet for the most part is split into two parties, the state council forms
a third, the Duma a fourth, and your own will is unknown to the nation. This
cannot go on, your Majesty, this is not a government, it is anarchy.’
Source: M.V. Rodzianko, The Reign of Rasputin: An Empire's Collapse, London, 1927, p. 210.
(J) Report on the labour situation by the Ministry of the Interior, October 1913.
Sudden strikes flare up sometimes for the most trivial causes and embracing
with extraordinary rapidity wide areas with tens of thousands of workers. But
apart from that, the strike movement we are now experiencing has a yet more
threatening social significance in that it arouses hostility and bitterness
between employer and worker, imites the workers on the basis of an irrecon
cilable relationship to the existing state and social structure and in this way
creates amongst the workers ready cadres to reinforce the revolutionary par
ties. Under the influence of agitators and the printed organs of the Social-
Democratic press, with the moral and material support of different workers'
circles, there has recently developed amongst the workers a harmony of action
such as indicates their close solidarity and organised nature. The places where
strikes take place are put under a boycott, those workers who approach are
exposed to bitter persecution and are excluded from work. Orders at strike
bound factories and plants are also placed under a boycott and any factory
that might accept them risks a strike amongst its own workers. ^
Source: quoted in Ferro, p. 160.
(K) Extract from an article by S. Elpatevsky in the journal Russian Wealth, January
1914.
The government, after seeking to reach an understanding with the Kadets,

then with the Octobrists, has now moved over to the right wing parties,
while on the other side of the fence, all expectations within the Duma of any
possible legislative work with the government are steadily declining. The
crisis has now become so acute that revolution or counter-revolution appear
the only way out. Even some of the Octobrists are now being heard to say
that there is no longer any sense in trying to safeguard the Duma, while the
right wing factions, which for a year now have been loudly warning of
‘impending conflict’, ‘revolution’, and ‘repetition of 1905’, have managed to
persuade themselves of the inevitability of a ‘catastrophic confrontation’. It
is clear that the tensions in national life are rapidly approaching the breaking
point.
Source: quoted in Figes, p. 250. v^
60 Mastering Twentieth-Century B&js&an History

1. Dominic Iieven, Nicholas II: Emperor o f All the Russias, and Edvard Radzinsky, The Last
Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, London, 1992, are good recent biographies.
2. Theodore Shanin, Russia as a 'Developing Society', vol. 1 of Russia's Roots o f Otherness, for
an excellent survey of Russian society at this time.
3. Dominic Lieven, 'The Aristocracy and the Gentry', in Acton, Chemiaev and Rosenberg
(editors), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914-1921, p. 481.
4. Peter Gatrell, 'Russian Industrialists and Revolution', in Acton, Chemiaev and Rosenberg
(editors), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, p. 574.
5. Robert Service, A History of Twentieth Century Russia, p. 7.
6. Alec Nove, An Economic History o f the USSR, 1917-1991, p.12.
7. Alexander Gerschenkron, ‘Agrarian Policies and Industrialization in Russia, 1861-1917’,
in Cambridge Economic History o f Europe, vol. 6, part 2, gives a clear statement of this,
the traditional view.
8. J.Y. Simms, 'The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A
Different View*, Slavic Review, 36,1977, for one of the earliest statements of the revision
ist view. See also Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1815-1917, p. 34, for a more recent
interpretation.
9. Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: the Russian Revolution 1891-1924, p. 57; Alan Wild-
man, The End o f the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1, pp. 33-5.
10. J. Bushnell, Mutiny Amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution o f 1905-1906,
pp. 15-21.
11. Peter Gatrell, ' Peasants and Politics’, Modem History Review, April 1995, p. 6.
12. Robert Service, Lenin, A Biography, p. 171.
13. Quoted in William G. Rosenberg, 'The Constitutional Democrat Party (Kadets) ’, in Acton,
Chemiaev and Rosenberg (editors), p. 256.
14. Abraham Ascher, The Revolution o f1905: Russia in Disarray is a good account of the 1905
Revolution.
15. Figes, A People's Tragedy, p. 121.
16. Ibid., p. 202.
18. Nove, p. 15.
19. Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850-1917, pp. 98-140.
20. Stephen L. Hoch, ‘Malthus, Population Trends and Peasant Standard of Living in Late
Imperial Russia’, Slavic Review, 1994, pp. 41-75.
21. Robert Service, The Russian Revolution, 1900-1927 (1999 edition), pp. 12-13.
22. Peter Waldron, The End o f Imperial Russia, 1855-1917, p. 61.
23. All the statistics in this section are from Nove, pp. 2-8.
24. Alexander Gerschenkron, p. 207.
25. Nove, pp. 6-7.
26. GJ l Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment. Government and Duma, 1907-1914,
for a detailed account of the Dumas.
27. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919, p. 159.
pp. 32-3.
29. Marc Ferro, Nicholas II, the Last o f the Tsars, p. 115.
30. Leon Trotsky, The History o f the Russian Revolution, p. 57.
31. Pipes, pp. 192-3.
32. L H. Haimson, 'The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917’, Slavic
Review, December 1964, pp. 634-6.
33. Edvard Radzinsky, Rasputin, is the most recent biography.
34. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 38.
35. Read, p. 35.
36. Robert Service, The Russian Revolution, 1900-1927, pp. 3-4.

MZ 3 The First W o rld W a r and the
collapse of Tsarism, 1914-17
Summary of events
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century Russian interests in
foreign affairs had focused on two main areas: the Balkan peninsula stretching
down to the Dardanelles - the exit from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean;
and the Far East. The interest in the Balkans brought Russia into conflict with
Austria-Hungary and Turkey, and in the Far East with Japan, and its policies
were not very fruitful:
Military and diplomatic defeats for Russia

• 1854-56 Defeat in the Crimean War
• 1878 Diplomatic defeat at the Congress of Berlin
• 1904-05 Defeat in war with Japan
Europe divides into 'armed camps’

Meanwhile the leading states of Europe were forming themselves into two
opposing alliance systems often described as 'armed camps’: \
• 1882 Triple Alliance completed - includes Germany, Austria-Hungary

and Italy
• 1894 Russia and France sign an alliance
• 1902 Britain and Japan sign an agreement
• 1904 Britain and France sign an agreement known as the Entente
Cordiale
• 1907 Russia signs an agreement with Britain, completing the Triple
Entente
28 June 1914 Assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo

There were several tense incidents from 1905 onwards, but somehow a major
war was avoided. The event which did eventually lead to war was the assassin
ation of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife on
28 June 1914. They were on an official visit to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia,
when they were both shot dead by a Serbian terrorist. The Austrians blamed the

Serbs and on 28 July declared war on Serbia. After that events moved swiftly and
in little more than a week, almost the whole of Europe was at war:
• The following day the Russians, allies of Serbia, ordered a general mobiliza
tion of their forces.
• The German government demanded that this should be cancelled (31 July)
but the Russians refused to comply, whereupon Germany declared war on
Russia (1 August) and on Russia’s ally France (3 August).
• Britain came into the war on 4 August after German troops entered Belgium
on their way to invade France.
• Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia on 6 August.
1914 The Russians succeeded in mobilizing more quickly than their enemies
expected, and launched invasions of both the German territory of East Prussia
and the Austrian province of Galicia. Against Austrian forces, the Russians did
well, capturing Lemberg (Lwow), the capital of Austrian Galicia. However, the
Russian forces were soon struggling against the Germans; they were heavily
defeated in two battles in East Prussia: Tannenburg (August) and the Masurian
Lakes (September), and were driven out of Germany. Worse was to follow.
1915 The Germans occupied Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, and Nicholas made
the mistake of assuming personal command of all Russian forces, which took
him away from the capital where he was most needed, and made him personally
responsible for the army’s misfortunes.
1916 At first during 1916 Russian fortunes improved - General Brusilov

launched a successful offensive against the Austrians, advancing 100 miles and
capturing 400,000 prisoners and large amounts of equipment. However, the
advantage was thrown away by tactical blunders, and the Germans gradually
pushed the Russians back. The strain was beginning to tell on the Russians who
continued to suffer defeat whenever they met German troops.
1917 On the home front ministers were sacked and replaced in rapid succession.
But it did nothing to improve the situation - there were severe food shortages in
the cities and the government seemed to have no idea how to cope with its
mounting problems.
The February revolution
• In February there were strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd (St Petersburg),

and these soon became violent. Eventually troops disobeyed orders to fire on
the crowds and mobs began to seize public buildings. The Duma hurriedly
formed a Provisional Committee and soldiers and workers elected representa
tives to the Petrograd Soviet.
• At first Nicholas was intent on restoring order and still refused to set up a con
stitutional monarchy. By this time all the leading groups - aristocracy, Duma,
industrialists and the army had turned against the Tsar and were convinced
The First W orld W ar and collapse of Tsarism 63

Figure 3.1 The Petrograd Garrison joins forces with the workers during the February
revolution - 2 7 February 1917.
that he must go. Some of his senior generals told him that the only way to save
the monarchy was for him to renounce the throne.
• On 2 March 1917, in the imperial train standing in a siding near Pskov, the Tsar
agreed to abdicate in favour of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael. However,
Michael decided not to accept the throne, and the Russian monarchy came to
an end. The Provisional Government was formed with Prince Lvov as chairman.

• Why were the Russians so quick to order a general mobilization, since

arguably, no country was directly threatening Russia?
• What were the reasons for Russia’s poor performance in the war?
• Was the Tsar overthrown by a revolution of the masses from below or by
a conspiracy of the elite?
• Did the masses ‘rise’ spontaneously or were they galvanized into action
by the Bolsheviks or other revolutionary groups?
3.1 Russia's foreign relations and

the approach of war
(a) Russia feels threatened in Europe
The fact that the Russian empire was the largest country in the world brought
with it a special problem - it meant that Russia had the longest frontier in the
world to protect (see Map 3.1). In the Far East her neighbours China and Japan
were not seen as a problem, since they were considered to be too weak to be
a threat. But in Europe there were long borders with Germany, Austria-Hungary
and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). For most of the nineteenth century Russia
had enjoyed good relations with Germany and Austria-Hungary, while France
and Britain were the powers which threatened Russian interests. However,
German foreign policy entered a more aggressive phase in 1890 under her new
ruler, the Kaiser Wilhelm II. There were signs that he intended to work closely
with Austria-Hungary to extend German influence in south-eastern Europe and
the Near East, including the Balkans - areas which were part of the Ottoman
Empire. The Turkish government was finding it increasingly difficult to keep
control of these provinces in the Balkans, where nationalist independence move
ments were challenging Turkish rule. Turkey had for a long time been regarded
as ‘the sick man of Europe’ and the other powers were on the look-out for any
advantages to be gained if and when the Turkish empire fell apart.
From Russia’s point of view, these areas were considered to be within her
sphere of influence and it was seen as vital to prevent them falling into the hands
of Austria-Hungary and Germany. The Russians had a two-fold interest in the
southern Balkans:•
• The peoples of this area were largely Slav and Christian, and Russia had trad
itionally claimed the right to protect them from oppression and persecution
by the Muslim Turks.
• Closely connected with this was the question of the Dardanelles - the narrow
straits which form the exit from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean (see
Map 3.2). Russia was handicapped both militarily and commercially by the
fact that many of her ports were ice-bound for several months of the year,
while ships could be prevented from sailing to and from her Black Sea ports if
The First World W ar and collapse of Tsarism 65

66
Mastering T w e n tie th -C e n tu ry Rysçian H istory
PACIFIC
OCEAN
KINGDOM OF SWEDEN
AND NORWAY
Oh
z>
ira to
I M . I - .if
MP-flir
*****
Russian Baltic fleet

4 : An ^ ta k , !
defeated by Japane
M
Map 3.1 The Russian Empire at the time of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5.
a hostile power controlled the Dardanelles. By the early years of the twentieth
century almost 50 per cent of Russia’s foreign trade passed through the straits.
The Germans were talking of building a railway to link Berlin with the Mediter
ranean and Baghdad. The prospect of a hostile Austria-Hungary, supported by
an aggressive Germany, blocking the passage of their merchant and military
shipping was enough to throw the Russians into a state of severe anxiety,
especially as her relations with the other two great powers - France and Britain -
were not altogether healthy (see Document A).
Since 1882 Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy had been linked together in the
Triple Alliance; because of this, Russia felt isolated and under threat. It was for
this reason that she began to look towards France as the most likely ally. The
French, who were still smarting from their defeat in the recent war with Prussia
(1870-71), responded readily and after long negotiations the final agreement was
signed in January 1894. It was understood that if France was attacked by
Germany, Russia would come to the assistance of France with all available forces.
If Russia was attacked by Germany, or by Austria-Hungary supported by
Germany, France would use all available forces against Germany. This agree
ment would remain in force for as long as the Triple Alliance was in existence.
The new friendship showed itself in other ways, chiefly in the French willingness
to make loans and invest in the developing Russian industry.
Nicholas n still felt insecure as far as Europe was concerned and was alarmed
at the cost of trying to keep up with Austria's armaments.1 This led him to call
the first Hague Peace Conference in Holland in 1899, to which 26 states sent
representatives. No agreement was reached on disarmament or on compulsory
arbitration of disputes but the conference had one great achievement - it set up
the International Court of Justice at the Hague, which is still in existence today.
(b) The Russo-Japanese W ar, 1904-05

This conflict developed from Russia’s rivalry with Japan over control of parts of
the ailing Chinese empire.2 The period before the First World War was a time of
imperial expansion. The Russians had gradually built up a huge empire, taking
over territory in the Ukraine, in Siberia, around the Baltic, in Poland and in
Transcaucasia and Central Asia. China, which was militarily weak, seemed the
most likely area for the next intervention. Sergei Witte saw China, especially the
provinces of Manchuria and Korea, as a lucrative market for exports of Russian
manufactured goods, and hoped that the Trans-Siberian Railway (started in
1886) would provide the key to success. In 1896 he persuaded China to allow the
railway to pass through Manchuria in order to shorten the route to Vladivostock;
this was on condition that Chinese sovereignty over Manchuria was respected.
However, the Russians soon broke the agreement by sending troops into
Manchuria. The other European powers were interested in China as well: in 1897
the Germans took the Chinese port of Kiaochow, while in 1898 the French
secured a base in Kwangchow Bay and the British leased the port of Wei-hai-wei.
Anxious not to be outdone, the Russians pressurized the Chinese to lease them
the Liaotung Peninsula (1898) where they built the naval base of Port Arthur.

Witte later claimed in his memoir^ that his policy was merely economic, and
that the war was the fault of Plehve, the Minister of the Interior from 1902 until
1904, whq planned it as 'a little victorious war to stem the tide of revolution'. But
it is clear from later evidence that the Russian government, Nicholas II and Witte
included, had decided by February 1903 that Manchuria would have to be
annexed; Russian control was thought to be vital in order to attract the necessary
investment to make her economic plans a success.
This was a risky policy which was bound to bring Russia into confrontation
with the Japanese, who also had ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. Even so, it
need not have led to war; the Japanese were prepared to compromise - they
offered to allow Russia a free hand in Manchuria in return for the same freedom
in Korea. If Witte had still been in office, it is likely that agreement would have
been reached; unfortunately Nicholas had just sacked him (August 1903), and
had fallen under the influence of a group of speculators who had business
interests in Korea. They persuaded the Tsar to reject the Japanese offer, and from
that point war was inevitable. The Japanese, convinced that Russia would not
negotiate, openly prepared for war. The Russians, believing that victory was
a foregone conclusion, were apparently happy for the Japanese to make the first
move, so that they could be blamed for starting the war.
The Japanese duly obliged in January 1904; without a declaration of war, they
attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. Several Russian ships were sunk and the
rest were blockaded in port. There was an outburst of patriotism, and government
propaganda portrayed the Japanese as The yellow peril' and 'the Asian hordes’
which were threatening the whole of European civilization. Two Russian sol
diers, it was said, were worth any three Japanese. With the Russian ships trapped
in harbour, the Japanese controlled the sea and this enabled them to landtrpops
in Korea to besiege Port Arthur. A Russian army advancing from Manchuria to
relieve Port Arthur was attacked by a smaller Japanese army and forced to retreat
to Mukden. Port Arthur fell to the Japanese early in 1905. In February the Russians
were forced to withdraw northwards from Mukden, after losing nearly 90,000
troops defending it.
The final humiliation came in May 1905; Russia’s Baltic fleet, which had spent
over seven months sailing from its base at Kronstadt round to the Far East, was
joined by the Black Sea fleet which had sailed by way of the Süez Canal. Together
they arrived off the coast of Japan and headed through the Straits of Tsushima on
their way to Vladivostock. But the Russian ships were slow and old and when
they were attacked by the much faster and more manoeuvrable Japanese, the
result was catastrophe. 15 Russian battleships and 54 other ships were sunk and
many others were captured; although a few escaped, it was the biggest naval dis
aster in Russian history.
The Russians were stunned - defeat by a small Asian country had not even
been considered a possibility. But the reasons for it were clear: the Russians had
completely underestimated the strength of the enemy. They carelessly allowed
the Japanese to seize the initiative at the beginning by taking control of the seas,
which enabled them to land troops, equipment and supplies without hindrance.
The Russians had the disadvantage of having to send reinforcements and supplies
thousands of miles from western Russiaalong the Trans-Siberian Railway, which
68 Mastering Twentieth-Century fyjsçian History

was not completed - there was a long gap around the southern end of Lake Baikal
where there were difficulties with the track sinking in the marshy ground.
Although the Russian troops acquitted themselves well, their generals were
poorly prepared and showed no imagination; they wasted thousands of lives in
pointless charges against fortified artillery positions, and were repeatedly out
manoeuvred by the Japanese. Amazingly, there was no proper General Staff - the
war minister was head of the army.
Fortunately for Russia, Japanese losses were also heavy, they had not succeeded
in destroying the main Russian armies, and their resources had been strained by
the war. Both sides were ready for peace and the USA was prepared to mediate.
A peace conference met at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Witte, recalled
after his earlier sacking, acted as Russia’s representative. He negotiated shrewdly,
playing on the fact that Japan was equally desperate for peace, and obtained
better terms than might have been expected. By the Treaty of Portsmouth
(September 1905) Russia gave Japan the southern half of the island of Sakhalin,
and this was the only Russian territory lost. It was agreed that Japan should have
the Liaotung Peninsula with Port Arthur, and Russia recognized a controlling
Japanese interest in Korea. Liaotung and Korea were Chinese territory anyway,
and it was also agreed that Manchuria should be restored to China, thus prevent
ing Japan from gaining control. But there was no disguising the fact that Russia’s
armed forces had been found seriously lacking and that the government was to
blame for its carelessness and complacency. It was clear that the army and navy
were in need of radical reform and modernization if Russia was to maintain its
position as a great power.
(c) Russia, France and Britain - the Triple Entente

The defeat by Japan in the Far East meant that there was no immediate prospect
of expansion in that region, and consequently Russian interest turned towards
Europe again. Nicholas was interested in an alliance with Germany, whose Kaiser
Wilhelm II was his cousin. However, several of his ministers warned Nicholas
that this would weaken Russia’s relationship with France, and advised him
strongly against it, pointing out that France was ‘the moneybox’. If friendship
with France was so vitally important, it followed that the logical next step was to
develop a good working relationship with France’s new Entente partner Britain.
Thus there occurred a radical change of direction in Russian foreign policy -
Russia turned towards the British with whom relations had been strained for
many years because of rivalry over Persia and Afghanistan and because Britain
suspected Russia of having designs on India; the British seemed to have a horror of
the possibility of Russian battleships being able to sail through the straits into the
Mediterranean, where British interests might be threatened. Twice in recent
history - in the Crimean War (1854-56) and at the Congress of Berlin (1878) -
they had gone to great lengths to prevent Russia gaining control of the Dardanelles
(see next section). In addition, Russia resented Britain’s alliance with Japan,
signed in 1902, although the British had given no direct help to the Japanese
during the war. Alexander Izvolski, Russia’s minister of foreign affairs from 1906
until 1910, was responsible for negotiating an agreement with Britain signed in

August 1907. Persia was divided up irito ‘spheres of influence’ - one for Russia in
the north of the country, one for Britain in the south-east, while the central area
was to bq left neutral; Russia agreed not to interfere in Afghanistan. There was no
promise of military assistance, but since Britain had recently signed the Entente
with France (1904), the Anglo-Russian agreement produced the Triple Entente
and seemed to complete the grouping of Europe into two camps.
It was unfortunate that both Germany and Austria-Hungary viewed the forma
tion of the Triple Entente as a hostile gesture directed against the Triple Alliance
(Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy). Both Russia and Britain protested that
this was not so and tried to maintain good relations. But gradually tensions
mounted between the two camps. The Germans accused the Entente powers of
trying to ‘encircle’ them; Britain and Germany were engaged in a ‘naval race’ to
see which of them could build most ‘Dreadnought’ batdeships; and Russian and
Austrian interests clashed in the Balkans, particularly over the question of Serbia.
(d) Trouble in the Balkans

Russian and Austrian rivalry in the Balkans reached a new climax in 1908, when
the Austrians announced the annexation of the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, sparking off what became known as the Bosnia Crisis (see Map 3.2).
It was a complex situation, and this is a good point to look at the background in
some detail. The Balkans region had been a source of trouble for much of the
nineteenth century. The problem was generally known as The Eastern Question;
the great question was: as Turkish control of the peoples of the Balkans grew
weaker, what was going to happen? Would these peoples - Greeks, Serbs, Croats,
Bulgarians and Romanians - be allowed to have their own independent states, or
would Russia take control of the area? This was a possibility which the other
powers, especially Britain and France, were determined to resist.
In 1828, after helping the Greeks to gain their independence, the Russians
defeated the Turks and forced them to sign the Treaty of Adrianople (1829). This
gave Russia the mouth of the River Danube, allowed the provinces of Moldavia
and Wallachia self-government under Russian protection, and guaranteed the
passage of Russian merchant ships through the straits.
In 1833 the Russians sent a fleet and 10,000 troops to help the Sultan of Turkey
deal with a rebellion in Anatolia, on the Asian side of the straits. There was inter
national consternation as the other European powers feared the Russians would
take Constantinople. But Nicholas I was far too shrewd to risk a war with the
whole of Europe. After the Turks had signed the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi (1833),
Russian forces were withdrawn. The agreement was to run for eight years and
included promises of mutual assistance as well as a Turkish guarantee to close
the straits to all foreign warships. This was a great achievement for the Russians,
since it meant that they became special protectors of the ‘sick man of Europe’
and gave them a permanent excuse to interfere in Turkish affairs.
After their defeat in the Crimean War, the Russians were forced to accept
the Treaty of Paris (1856). This stipulated that Russia could not have battleships
on the Black Sea, and was a severe blow to any prospect of their controlling
the southern Balkans. In 1870, while the êst of Europe was preoccupied with the

Map 32 The Balkans showing the situation after the Balkan Wars, 1912-13.
Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the Russians seized the opportunity to announce

that their battleships would sail on the Black Sea, Tor reasons of security and the
desire to preserve and strengthen peace/ Since this was supported by Bismarck,
the Chancellor of the newly united and victorious Germany, the other powers
went along with it too.
By this time there was a strong Panslav movement in Russia; Panslavists
believed that it was the duty of the Russians to protect other Slav peoples such as
the Serbs and Bulgarians in the Balkans, who were being ruled by non-Slavs.
Nikolai Ignatiev, the Russian ambassador in Constantinople from 1864 until 1877,
held strong Panslav views, and did not hesitate to stir up nationalist feelings

among the Serbs and Bulgarians in‘the hope of increasing Russian influence.
‘Russia must become the master in Constantinople,’ he wrote, ‘either by a Rus
sian becoming governor of the city and the Straits or by seizing the area. There is
no other way to ensure permanent protection of Russian interests.’3 When the
Serbs declared war on Turkey in June 1876, public opinion demanded that Rus
sia should spring to their assistance. The government was not enthusiastic -
most of the ministers were not Panslavists, and any Russian military intervention
in the Balkans was bound to upset the Austrians, who had their own interests in
the region. However, the Serbs soon began to suffer defeats and the pressure of
public opinion mounted. The Russians therefore came to an agreement with
Austria-Hungary, promising not to capture Constantinople and acknowledging
that the western Balkans (especially Bosnia-Herzegovina) were Austria’s sphere
of influence and the eastern Balkans (especially Bulgaria) were Russia’s sphere of
influence. In April 1877 Russia declared war on Turkey, and although the
campaign was far from easy, the Turks were defeated. The Russians were on the
outskirts of Constantinople, but they kept to the agreement and signed the
Treaty of San Stefano with the Turks (1878).
This was the high-point of Russia’s near-eastern policy - the terms of the treaty
were extremely advantageous. A large independent state of Bulgaria was set up
stretching right across the Balkan peninsula and with a coastline on the Aegean
Sea. Bulgaria was to be administered by Russia ‘for an initial period’; she would
have the use of the Aegean coastline which would enable her to by-pass the
Dardanelles. In addition Russia took territory from Romania giving her control of
the Danube mouth. Serbia, Montenegro and Romania were recognized as inde
pendent of Turkey, but there was no mention of Bosnia-Herzegovina being given
to Austria-Hungary, which had been hinted at as a reward for Austria's remain
ing neutral.
Sadly for the Russians, the Treaty of San Stefano was never carried out. Britain
and Austria protested strongly and moderate opinion prevailed in Russia. Bis
marck offered to act as ‘honest broker’, and it was agreed to hold an international
conference in Berlin to renegotiate the peace terms. By the new settlement,
signed in the summer of 1878, Russia lost much of the advantage gained from the
earlier treaty: the most important change was that the large state of Bulgaria was
divided into three parts - in the north, a small independent átate of Bulgaria; in
the centre, an area known as Eastern Roumelia, belonging to Turkey but having
self-government under a Christian governor; and in the south, the area with the
Aegean coastline, Macedonia, was to remain part of the Turkish Empire. The
Austrians were allowed to occupy and administer Bosnia and Herzegovina,
though nominally these provinces still belonged to Turkey.
The Congress of Berlin was a humiliating diplomatic defeat for the Russians;
the government of the Tsar Alexander II was severely criticized by the Panslavs
for letting down the Slavs of the southern Balkans, and public opinion turned
bitterly against Austria-Hungary and Britain. Critics of the Tsar’s autocratic rule
demanded a more consultative government and a constitution. In the long term
the most unfortunate outcome of the Congress was Serbian resentment at the
new Austrian influence in Bosnia and Herzegovina. These were provinces on
which the newly independent Serbia xhad designs, and it was this .friction
72 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rysîan History

between Austria-Hungary and Serbia which was to culminate in the outbreak of
the First World War in 1914.
After the Russian defeat in the Far East, her attention turned once again to the
Balkans. The Foreign Minister, Alexander Izvolski, was anxious to reassure
Austria-Hungary and Germany that the Triple Entente, completed in 1907, was
not directed against them. In 1908, following the outbreak of a revolution against
the Sultan of Turkey, Izvolski met his Austrian counterpart, Aehrenthal, at
Buchlau Castle in Moravia to discuss how this might affect the Balkans. They
agreed that both could take advantage of the situation - Austria-Hungary would
annexe the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with Russian approval;
in return Austria-Hungary promised to recognize Russia's right to use the Straits
at all times, and to persuade the other European powers to do the same.
Aehrenthal went ahead and announced the annexation, which was accepted by
the other powers; however, Austria-Hungary did nothing to further Russia's
claim to use the Straits at all times, and when the Russians raised the subject, the
other powers refused to hear of it.
It turned out to be a diplomatic disaster for Russia: Izvolski had been outman
oeuvred by Aehrenthal, and in fact most of the other Russian ministers were
against the agreement, which was seen as a betrayal of the Slavs in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Serbia, which had been hoping to annex the provinces, since many
Serbs lived there, was outraged, and appealed to Russia for help. The Russians
called for a European conference, expecting French and British support. How
ever, the Germans made it clear that they would support Austria-Hungary in the
event of war; Britain and France were lukewarm about becoming involved in a
war over the Balkans; in the end caution prevailed, the crisis passed, and Austria-
Hungary kept Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Russians had been humiliated: the
Serbs had been badly let down, and tsarist Russia, which had proclaimed itself
the guardian of all Serbs and other Slavs, had been made to look weak and inef
fective. The general public, which was better informed than ever before about
foreign affairs, thanks to the Duma and the new freedom enjoyed by newspapers,
was highly critical of government incompetence.
Russia’s diplomatic defeat stimulated the government into a massive military
build-up with extra spending of some 2000 million roubles. The Balkans
remained volatile; in a further attempt to limit Austrian influence, the Russians
encouraged the formation of an alliance between Serbia and Bulgaria which
eventually became the Balkan League (1912). But again the Russian plan back
fired: instead of attacking Austria-Hungary, the League declared war on Turkey,
starting the First Balkan War (1912). After the League had captured most of
Turkey’s remaining territory in Europe, a peace conference met in London to
share out the spoils. However, Serbia was not satisfied with her gains - she
wanted Albania which would give her an outlet to the sea. The Austrians were
determined that Serbia should not become any stronger, and with German and
British support, they insisted that Albania should become an independent state.
The Bulgarians were also dissatisfied with their gains - they wanted Macedonia,
but that was given to Serbia. In 1913 Bulgaria began the Second Balkan War by
attacking Serbia. Greece, Romania and Turkey rallied to support Serbia; the
Bulgarians were defeated and lost most of the territory acquired by the Treaty of

London. Serbia emerged much stronger from these wars, and Austria-Hungary
was becoming increasingly worried by this new threat to their empire.
«
(e) The outbreak of the First World W ar

Given the volatile nature of the Balkans, it was a provocative move by the
Austrians when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife paid an official
visit to Sarajevo, the capital of the recently annexed Bosnia at the end of June
1914. It was obviously calculated to irritate Serbia, and it was a Bosnian Serb
nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, who shot them both dead. The Austrians decided
to use the murders as a pretext for a ‘preventive’ war to crush Serbia before it
became any more powerful. The Austrians’ great fear was that if Serbia seized
Bosnia (which contained about three million Serbs), all the other Serbs living
inside the Habsburg Empire would want to join Serbia as well. This would
encourage other national groups - Czechs, Poles and Italians - to demand
independence, and the eventual result would be the collapse of the entire
Habsburg Empire. This is why the government in Vienna chose to blame the
Serb government for the assassinations and sent an ultimatum demanding
the right to send troops to ‘police’ Serbia. This was clearly unacceptable to
the Serbs, and consequently Austria-Hungary, encouraged by Germany,
declared war on Serbia.
Russia made the next move, ordering a general mobilization of forces, and
soon all the major powers of Europe were involved.4Why was Russia so quick to
respond with the mobilization order? Earlier in the year Nicholas and many of his
ministers had favoured a cautious approach. His military chiefs had told him
that the army would not be ready for war until 1917. In February P.N. Diirhovo,
the Minister of the Interior, warned him that a long war could only result in
defeat and revolution. However, it was Nicholas himself who took the decision to
mobilize as a matter of prestige - if Russia was to continue to be regarded as a
great power, they dare not let Serbia and the Slavs down again and suffer another
humiliation as they had done in 1908. Although with hindsight it can be regarded
as a rash decision, most of the country seemed to be behind him. Almost all the
parties in the Duma were conscious of Russian honour and were expecting some
action; public opinion would have been bitterly disappointed if no positive
response had been made. And there were other considerations as well: the Rus
sians were worried by the build-up of German economic and cultural influence
in Turkey. As well as the Berlin-Baghdad Railway project, there was the appoint
ment of a German general to command the Turkish army at Constantinople and
to advise on the reform of the Turkish military organization. All this was taken by
the Russians as a deliberate challenge to their hopes of controlling the Straits,
and since so much of their trade passed through there, it was a challenge that
had to be met. The Russians rightly suspected that Germany had plans to take
over some of their western European territories as well, and they feared that
Germany was intent on a preventive war before Russian military preparations
were completed. The German historian Fritz Fischer showed that both these
suspicions were well grounded.5 And finally there were some ministers who,
incredibly after the lessons of the war with Japan, supported Nicholas because

they thought that a short victorious war would unite the country and distract
attention from all Russia’s internal problems.
3.2 The war and its impact on the Tsarist system

(a) The military front and the home front
When the war began there was an immediate outburst of patriotic enthusiasm.
There were massive demonstrations of support for the Tsar and the country;
students from the university marched on the German embassy in St Petersburg
and ransacked it, and the Duma voted war credits almost without question; only
the Bolshevik deputies condemned the war and were accordingly arrested. The
government changed the name of the capital from St Petersburg, which sounded
German, to Petrograd. T solemnly swear,’ declared the Tsar, ‘that I will never
make peace so long as one of the enemy is on the soil of the fatherland.’When he
appeared on the balcony of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, the huge crowd
went wild with enthusiasm; the whole country was united behind the Tsar. If the
war could have been concluded with a swift victory within a few months, like the
Prussian defeat of France in 1870-71, the Tsarist regime might well have been
strengthened, at least for the time being. Unfortunately, nobody had made plans
for a long war; the longer a war lasts, the greater the test for whatever regime
happens to be in power; any weaknesses will be mercilessly exposed. Russia had
two major weaknesses: an economy which was not as advanced as that of her
main enemy, Germany, and an obsolete political system which was incapable of
adapting to change.
Although the Russians were always successful on the Austrian fronts, it was
a different story against the Germans (Map 3.3). At the Battle of Tannenberg
in August 1914 around 70,000 Russian soldiers were killed and almost 100,000,
together with 400 guns, were captured; only 10,000 troops escaped; the Russian
commander, Samsonov, unable to face the humiliation, shot himself. German
troops came to the assistance of the Austrians, and gradually the Russians were
pushed back on all fronts (see Documents B and C). By the autumn of 1915 they
had lost all the captured Austrian territory in Galicia, the Germans were in
control of Poland, and German forces were approaching the great industrial city
of Riga on the Baltic. Between 1 May and 1 December 1915 the Russians lost
a million men killed and another million taken prisoner. Organization was
chaotic; Mikhail Rodzianko, the Chairman of the Duma, found 17,000 wounded
soldiers lying unattended at the Warsaw railway station in Petrograd, ‘in the cold
rain and mud without so much as straw litter.’ The enthusiastic support for the
government had long since evaporated. The regime’s competence was once again
seriously in doubt, and it was left to other groups to take necessary initiatives.
Following the lead of the Moscow zemstvo, many other zemstva and town gov
ernments formed themselves into unions to organize the evacuation of the sick
and wounded and to provide medical care, hospitals and hospital trains. They
eventually united to form Zemgor (the Union of Zemstva and Municipalities)
under the chairmanship of Prince Lvov; they soon extended their activities to

Map 3.3 Russian operations during the First World War.
organizing local industry to provide boots, uniforms, tents, blankets and ntedical
supplies. Another new body was the War Industry Committee chaired by Alexan
der Guchkov, the Octobrist leader; its function was to supervise the changeover
of factories to military production and so increase the output of munitions. In
August 1915 the centre parties in the Duma (Kadets, Progressists and Qctobrists)
formed a Progressive Bloc which had a majority of votes. They hoped to'persuade
Nicholas to co-operate with the Duma and form what they called ‘a government
enjoying public confidence' - in other words they wanted him to appoint minis
ters approved by the Duma. Several of his ministers supported the Progressive
Bloc proposals. But once again the Tsar lacked the vision to appreciate the
advantages of such a change (see Documents E and F). Instead he adjourned the
Duma, sacked the ministers who had ventured to make radical suggestions, and
announced that he was taking personal command of the army. From the autumn
of 1915 he spent most of his time at army headquarters in Mogilev, leaving the
Empress Alexandra and Rasputin to hold the fort in St Petersburg. In fact the
Progressive Bloc was an alternative government in waiting and in February 1917
many of its leading members were to form the Provisional Government.
Although casualties had been heavy, the Russian army had not been destroyed;
during the winter of 1915-16 there was a lull in the fighting which gave the Russians
a chance to train new troops and replenish stocks of arms and ammunition.
In the summer of 1916 General Brusilov began an offensive against the Austro-
Hungarian forces in Galicia which became the greatest Russian success in the

war. Brusilov was a brilliant strategist who quickly learned from earlier failures.
The offensive was meticulously planned —the Austrian trenches were carefully
mapped, using aerial photography, and the Russians knew exactly where the
enemy batteries and machine-guns were situated. Instead of concentrating the
attack at one point, the Russians attacked simultaneously at four points spread
out along the whole length of the front, so that the Austrians did not know where
to expect the main blow. It was a stunning victory - the Austrians lost over half
their army in the east either killed or captured, and their morale was destroyed.6
The Germans withdrew 35 divisions from the western front to send reinforcements
to the east, and this enabled the French fortress town of Verdun to survive the
German siege.
Brusilov wanted the Russian armies on the north-western front to attack the
Germans while the Austrians were still in complete disarray, but the Tsar ignored
his repeated requests and instead moved troops from the north to Brusilov's
front. However, this only eased pressure on the Germans, enabling them to trans
fer troops to the south to bolster up the Austrians; the Russian offensive gradually
came to a halt. Although it was a great victory, it made no difference to the general
war situation.
It was on the home front that the signs of strain were most obvious. There were
increasing shortages of food, fuel and basic consumer goods; the transport
system was in chaos, inflation was rife, and worst of all, there were the continu
ing enormous casualties - there was hardly a family in Russia who had not lost at
least one son either killed or taken prisoner. The regime kept on changing its
ministers - a practice which became known as 'ministerial leapfrog': between
August 1915 and February 1917 no fewer than 36 different ministers held the 13
major posts. When the Duma reconvened in November 1916, the Kadet leader,
Paul Milyukov, made a dramatic speech in which he listed his criticisms of the
government; after each one he put the question Ts this stupidity or treason?’ (see
Document G). The use of the word ‘treason’ by such a moderate politician (and
a professor of history) caused a sensation, especially as the government tried to
ban publication of the speech. Milyukov himself later remarked: ‘My speech
acquired the reputation of a storm-signal for the revolution.’ A great political
upheaval of some sort was clearly inevitable; the only question was, would it
come from above or from below?
(b) Assessment of Russia’s performance in the war

Until the mid- 1970s the traditional view was that Russia’s war effort was a total
failure. The economy was too backward to produce arms and ammunition in
sufficient quantities to match German production. Russia was crippled by the
German blockade of the Baltic and by the Turkish closure of the Dardanelles. No
supplies of any sort could get in, and so the Russians slowly ran out of raw mater
ials and equipment. There were severe food shortages caused by a dramatic fall
in agricultural production, which was itself caused by millions of peasants being
taken away from farming to do military service. Food shortages were especially
serious in the large cities. As for the Russian army, that was badly equipped,
badly trained and badly led; although it had some successes against Austria-

Hungary, that was only because the Habsburg Empire was even weaker than
Russia. As Trotsky put it: Tn the past Russia had only been successful against
inwardly decomposing states like Turkey, Poland, Persia... The disintegrating
Habsburg monarchy had long ago hung out a sign for an undertaker.’7 By the end
of 1916 the Russian army had lost its will to fight. By this time too the Russian
people were weary of the war and they turned against the Tsar because he
wanted to continue the fighting. This was the line of argument consistentiy fol
lowed by Soviet historians who wanted to play down whatever progress had been
made under the Tsarist regime in order to exaggerate Stalin’s achievement in
modernizing Russia.
In the 1970s some of these details were challenged; this does not affect the
general conclusion that the Tsarist regime collapsed because it couldn’t cope
with the war, but it does suggest that Russia’s backwardness was not in economic
power but in the organization of the ways in which that power was used. Norman
Stone was the first historian to show that in fact Russian industry did meet the
challenge of war reasonably efficiently. AU areas of the economy grew, some of
them very fast. Between 1914 and 1917 the output of coal rose by almost 30 per
cent and there was a huge expansion of the engineering and chemical industries.
By 1916,78 per cent of machine construction firms were working to supply army
requirements, and most factories seem to have adapted their plant successfully
to produce arms and ammunition. By September 1916 there had been a 2000 per
cent growth in the output of shells and 1000 per cent in artUlery and rifles;
Russian industry was matching German production of sheUs for use on the
eastern front. The problem was one of transportation and distribution, and there
were a large number of bottle-necks which threw the economy into chaos.8
Another problem was that non-military areas of manufacturing industry Were
neglected, causing a shortage of household consumer goods and agricultural
implements, and this in turn contributed towards inflation. As to the naval
blockades cutting off imports, this was not a serious problem by 1916, thanks to
the expansion of Russian industry, plus the fact that more supplies were brought
in through Murmansk, Archangel and Vladivostock. The real problem turned out
to be difficulties in exporting Russian grain via the Dardanelles - exports which
were vital for a healthy trade balance. By 1917 Russia had a huge trade deficit,
causing the government to run short of cash. The regime tried to finance the war
effort by the almost unlimited printing of banknotes, but this only escalated the
inflation. The side-effect of all this which proved most dangerous for the regime
was the fact that the massive expansion of industry brought in hundreds of
thousands of new workers from the countryside; for instance the population of
St Petersburg grew from 2.2 million in 1914 to 2.5 million in 1917. As inflation
soared, real wages dropped alarmingly, and this contributed to the growing dis
illusion among the workers and led to a wave of strikes towards the end of 1916.
Stone also challenges the view that Russia’s military effort was a complete fail
ure. He argues that there was very little to choose in quality between Russian and
German ordinary rank-and-file soldiers. General Brusilov showed in his 1916
offensive that when the troops were given good leadership, they were capable of
military success. This was one of several occasions during the war when the
efforts of the Russian army helped to takè pressure off French and British troops
78 Mastering Twentieth-Century RJsslan History

fighting on the western front, and it was in this way that the Russians made a vital
contribution towards the ultimate allied victory. It was incompetence at the top
which reduced Russia’s military effectiveness; in March 1916 for example, the
War Minister, Polivanov, who was responsible for rebuilding the army after the
disasters of 1915, was sacked because the Tsarina Alexandra thought he was too
much of a revolutionary; his offence was his willingness to work with Zemgor and
the War Industries Committee. The Tsar's tactical blunders threw away the
advantages of Brusilov’s successful offensive. Stone believes that in spite of all
the problems - shortages of war material, the primitiveness of Russia’s railway
system compared with Germany’s, and massive desertion of troops - the majority
of Russian forces had not lost their will to fight. The army was not disintegrating
and by the beginning of 1917 the front had been stabilized.
Historians have also rejected the claim that there was a dramatic fall in grain
output during the war. According to Robert Service, there was no great labour
shortage in agriculture because, although over 14 million peasants were taken
into the army and navy, this only removed the surplus workers. There were excel
lent harvests in 1914 and 1915, and the 1916 harvest was only 10 per cent below
the average for the five years before 1914. This, together with the reduction in
grain exports, meant that there was more wheat in the country during those
years than ever before.9 So why were there food shortages? The reason was again
partly transportation problems: the military monopolized the railways in the
west to carry troops, ammunition and food to the front, and this caused a short
age of trains for taking grain from the south up to the Moscow and St Petersburg
areas. As time went on there was a shortage of spare parts for locomotives and
rolling stock which were no longer being imported; by the end of 1916 about
a quarter of the trains were out of commission.
Another problem was that peasants were marketing less grain in protest at the
low prices being paid by grain dealers who were making huge profits. By 1917 the
price of grain had increased to four times the 1914 level, but the peasants them
selves received very little in the way of extra profits. Many of them hoped to force
dealers to pay a better price by hoarding their grain and others fed more grain to
their cattle or made it into vodka. The result - not only was bread in short supply
in the towns and cities, it was also expensive, and there were bread queues every
where. These extreme wartime conditions, as Tsuhoshi Hasegawa points out,
were responsible for revitalizing the workers' strike movement; during 1916 the
strikes grew in frequency and militancy. Clearly by the end that year, as radical
revolutionary groups were able to increase their influence among the workers,
things were approaching crisis point. Bread queues were getting longer and
workers were going hungry.10The failure of the regime lay not in the mobilization
of troops or the production of war materials and food, but in the breakdown of
administration and distribution - goods, especially food, were simply not being
delivered where they were needed.
(c) The revolution of February/March 1917

By the beginning of 1917 all classes in society were disillusioned with the way the
government was running the war, and since the Tsar was the leading figure in the

government, it meant that everybody was turning against the Tsar. The Duma,
whose advice and attempts at compromise he had consistently rejected, was
divided: eta the one hand Milyukov and the moderates were still hoping for a
compromise with the government and were afraid that even a ‘limited* revolution
would get out of control and sweep away the whole social structure. On the other
hand the more radical members such as the socialist Alexander Kerensky, were
calling for the overthrow of the regime; they too were worried that if the Duma
failed to act soon, the crowds would take matters into their own hands. Others,
long since despairing of any sensible compromise with Nicholas and Alexandra,
hoped for a coup to replace Nicholas with a more amenable member of the
royal family. In December 1916 Alexander Guchkov, the Octobrist leader, and
a supporter of the monarchy, was involved in a plan to seize the imperial train
with Nicholas on board and force him to abdicate in favour of his son, with
Nicholas’s brother, the Grand Duke Michael, acting as Regent. Insufficient sup
port caused them to postpone action until March 1917, but by then events had
overtaken them.
The middle classes - lecturers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, businessmen and
industrialists - were all exasperated by government incompetence and by the
Tsar's dismissive treatment of their representatives in the Duma. Industrialists
were especially resentful that in spite of all their efforts to produce war materials,
administrative failings were bringing Russia to the brink of defeat. The St Petersburg
steelworks owner, Putilov, claimed that the entire administrative machine would
have to be reformed if Russia was to win the war. As early as June 1915 he told the
French ambassador: ‘The days of Tsarism are numbered; the revolution is now
inevitable. It only awaits its opportunity.’
The nobles had become disaffected for a variety of reasons. Many nobleland-
owners were in economic difficulties because they could no longer rely on peasants
to work on their estates. They were appalled at the wasteful slaughter of their
sons in the officer corps. In November 1916 the United Nobility in Petrograd and
Moscow passed resolutions supporting the Progressive Bloc. The noh)e elite in
Petrograd had never liked Alexandra because she was German and because she
was unwilling to mix in society. As the war dragged on she was suspected of
being pro-German and of trying to negotiate a separate peace. The nobles
detested her close association with Rasputin and resented the power he seemed
to have over her. In December 1916 a small group of nobles led by Prince Yusupov
murdered Rasputin, hoping to free the royal family from his influence and force
the Tsar to listen to what they called ‘the voice of the nation’. However, this made
no difference to the conduct of the war, and by January 1917 the Tsar’s relatives
and other nobles had reached the conclusion that the only way to save the
monarchy was to remove Nicholas. They became involved in a plot organised by
Prince Lvov to exile Alexandra to the Crimea and to force Nicholas to hand over
power to the young Alexei with the Grand Duke Nicholas (a cousin of Alexander III)
as Regent. This plan fell through when the Grand Duke turned down the offer on
the grounds that ordinary people would not understand what had happened.
The fact that the Grand Duke did not inform the Tsar of the plot against him
shows how alienated even his own family had become. Many of the top army
generals thought of Nicholas as a liability and were considering how best to get
80 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rtisáan History

rid of him. General Krymov told a secret meeting of Duma members: ‘We would
welcome the news of a coup d'état. A revolution is imminent and we at the front
feel it to be so. If you decide on such an extreme step, we will support you. Clearly
there is no other way.’
None of these groups actually did anything beyond talking about removing
Nicholas. It was the women and the workers of Petrograd and other centres who
took the first action. There had already been a wave of strikes in the capital
towards the end of 1916 which the government had suppressed. Discontent
among the urban workers could only get worse; even a police report in January
1917 shows some sympathy for them and talks of the despair of the workers who
are ‘reduced to the level of cattle fit only to serve as cannon-fodder' (see Docu
ment H). A massive strike and demonstration in Petrograd, on the anniversary
of the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre, passed off peacefully. The real trouble
began in the middle of February when stocks of flour and fuel in Petrograd and
Moscow fell to their lowest level ever and there were rumours that bread rationing
was about to be introduced. It was a colder than average winter and people had
to queue for hours on end, even sometimes all night for a single loaf in
temperatures well below freezing. The police reports talk of the growing anger
and fhistration among the women who had to spend so much of their time
queuing for food.
On 21 February the Putilov steelworks was forced to close down through lack
of fuel, and thousands of workers came out on the streets to demonstrate against
the regime. There were speeches, revolutionary songs and anti-tsarist slogans.
The following day the weather in Petrograd suddenly turned warmer; the tem
perature reached 6 degrees centigrade and it stayed mild for a week. Some his
torians think this had an important effect on the events of the next few days
because the warmer weather encouraged more people to come out on the
streets, and it was then that the first disorders broke out. 23 February was Inter
national Women's Day: there was a demonstration in favour of equality for
women and more bread. Thousands of men joined in - some were still laid off
from the Putilov works, others were on strike. Over the next few days the demon
strations grew, they were joined by office and shop workers and by students, and
they became more violent. Crowds began to attack food shops and on Saturday
25 February red flags appeared; there were clashes with the police and three
people were killed. The demonstrators' demands became more political; their
banners were now demanding the overthrow of the government: ‘Down with the
Tsar' and ‘Down with the War'.
Until this point General Khabalov, the military commander in Petrograd, had
done his best to avoid bloodshed, anxious not to provoke the demonstrators.
However, later that day Nicholas, who was at military headquarters at Mogilev,
made a fatal mistake - he sent a telegram to Khabalov saying that the unrest in
Petrograd could not be tolerated. T order you to stop tomorrow the disorders in
the capital, which are unacceptable at the difficult time of war with Germany and
Austria.' Consequently the next day troops occupied the centre of Petrograd and
a curfew was imposed. Still the demonstrators came out; in several parts of the
city soldiers fired at them; the worst incident took place in Znamenskaya Square,
where a detachment of young trainee soldiers began firing wildly at the crowds,

killing at least 50 people.11 This proved to be the decisive turning point The
regime had failed to realize that the army was as disillusioned as the civilians.
It was shortly after this that the troops began to mutiny —about 600 of them at
first - and refused to fire on the unarmed crowds. Three days later the entire
Petrograd garrison of 170,000 men refused to obey orders, and started shooting
their officers and fraternizing with the crowds (see Document K). These troops
were a mixture of young peasant conscripts who had not yet seen any real fight
ing, and soldiers about to be sent back to the front after recovering from wounds.
Neither group was reliable and both were sickened at the prospect of having to
shoot any more innocent civilians.
Meanwhile Nicholas was still at Mogilev about 600 kilometres south of Petro
grad. Rodzianko, the president of the Duma, sent a telegram informing him
about the situation and suggesting that ‘some person who enjoys the confidence
of the country be entrusted at once with the formation of a new government
There must be no delay.’ But Nicholas rejected this idea and ordered the Duma
to adjourn until April. This was his last chance to work with the Duma to save the
monarchy, but once again he failed to understand the situation. Instead he
ordered more troops to Petrograd to restore order. The Duma committed its first
illegal act by forming a 12-man committee to try and calm the situation itself.
Troops supporting the revolution took over the Winter Palace and on 27 February
crowds stormed the Peter and Paul fortress and other prisons and freed all the
inmates, including the SR and SD leaders who had been arrested in December
1916. The next target was the secret police headquarters which were ransacked
and its files and records burnt; then the crowds moved on to loot arsenals, shops
and restaurants. By the end of 27 February the regime had lost control of the
capital and the next day workers and soldiers elected representatives io the
Petrograd soviet. As yet though, the Duma hesitated to announce that it had
taken control, since legally the Tsar was still in power, Petrograd now had two
potentially rival governments in waiting - the Duma committee and the Soviet -
and both of them were meeting in the Tauride Palace, in opposite wipgs of the
building (see Document J).
Nicholas was still unaware of how serious the situation was and of just how
quickly events were moving. On 28 February the trains carrying troop reinforce
ments to restore order in Petrograd were stopped because railway workers had
tom up the tracks; when the soldiers learned what had happened in Petrograd,
they too mutinied. The imperial train taking the Tsar and his entourage to his
residence at Tsarskoe Selo outside the capital was also held up by hostile
troops and forced to take a detour to Pskov, where it arrived late in the evening
of 1 March. By this time all the elite were ready to sacrifice Nicholas, though
they hoped to keep the monarchy, in order to save their own skins. General
Ruszky met the Tsar aboard his train and showed him telegrams reporting
revolution in Moscow and mutinies in the Baltic fleet and at the Kronstadt naval
base. There were telegrams from most of the leading generals urging Nicholas to
abdicate ‘so as to preserve the country’s independence and save the dynasty.'
The Tsar always had great respect for the opinions of his generals and this is
what finally convinced him that he could not go on. At first Ruszky persuaded
him to agree to form a responsible government, but after a telephone call from
82 Mastering Twentieth-Century Ressian History

Rodzianko explaining that the country was on the verge of anarchy, the Tsar
agreed to abdicate in favour of his son Alexei (2 March). When Guchkov and
Shulgin, two delegates from the Duma, arrived in Pskov to urge abdication, he
had already made up his mind. If he could not rule as an autocratic monarch
then he would not rule at all. Soon afterwards Nicholas decided that the boy was
not strong enough to take on the role of Tsar and he named his brother the
Grand Duke Michael as his successor. Unfortunately nobody had taken the
trouble to discover whether or not Michael, who was not the least bit interested
in politics, was willing to become the next Tsar. The following day he refused the
offer after being told that the Duma could not guarantee his safety. The 300-year-
old Romanov monarchy was at an end and Russia became a republic, an outcome
which neither the generals nor the Duma politicians had intended. The leaders
of the Progressive Bloc formed a temporary government - the Provisional
Government - to rule the country until elections for a new Assembly could be
held. Nicholas was placed under arrest but allowed to return to his family at
Tsarskoe Selo.
(d) Revolution from above or below?

There has been a great deal of discussion among historians about which was the
vital element in the overthrow of the Tsarist regime. E.H. Carr, writing back in
1950, offered a wide-ranging explanation which seems to cover all the elements
involved. He believed that the February revolution was ‘the spontaneous
outbreak of a multitude exasperated by the privations of war and by manifest
inequality in the distribution of burdens.’ This spontaneous outburst was
‘welcomed and utilized by a broad stratum of the bourgeoisie and of the official
class, which had lost confidence in the autocratic system of government and
especially in the persons of the Tsar and his advisers.’12
Other historians have focused on one or more particular aspects of the situation
as the key element. George Katkov thought the conspiracy among the elite was the
decisive factor, that the nobles, the Duma and especially the generals pressurized
Nicholas to abdicate in order to prevent a real mass revolution developing; the
‘spontaneous’ strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd were not so much a cause
of the revolution as a symptom of it. Katkov was alone among historians in attach
ing vital importance to German attempts at stirring up revolution in Russia and to
the machinations of a masonic group within the elite.13W.H. Chamberlin, writing
nearer to the events (1935), came to the opposite conclusion: he argued that it was
‘one of the most leaderless, spontaneous, anonymous revolutions of all time’ - a
revolution from below by the masses was decisive because it threw the privileged
classes into a panic. Without the crowds on the streets and the mutiny of the
troops, there would have been no need for the elite to act.14 Most traditional lib
eral historians took the view that the mass uprisings were a direct result of the war
and its deprivations, and had very little to do with the efforts of the revolutionary
parties. Their organizations had been suppressed by the police, they were demor
alized and nearly all their most influential leaders were living in exile. Even Lenin
had admitted in a speech delivered in Switzerland in January 1917 that his genera
tion would probably not live to see the revolution.

Soviet historians went along with the ‘revolution from below* theory but felt
that too much emphasis had been placed on spontaneity. In their view it was
organized; they make the point that events don’t just happen without origin or
cause. Who fixed the timing of the strikes? Who decided on the formation and
starting points of demonstrations? Who spread the news? For Soviet historians
there was only one answer - the revolutionary groups, especially the Bolshevik
Party. They argued that the local revolutionary committees had recovered from
the secret police clampdown of December 1916 and were consciously using the
situation to turn the strikes into demonstrations and the demonstrations into
revolution. They claim to have found evidence of Bolshevik organizations in two
hundred towns, and in the navy and in the army at the front. There were no fewer
than 18 different illegal Bolshevik periodicals in circulation. Although Lenin was
in exile, he was in constant touch with Bolshevik activists inside Russia, and
it was his brilliant leadership which guided the party throughout the war. In
contrast the SRs and Mensheviks were largely ineffective, their organizations in
disarray and their membership tiny. They could not begin to match the discip
line, the commitment and the unity of the Bolshevik Party.
Leon Trotsky also argued that the idea of a spontaneous revolution, that is,
a revolution with no planned leadership from above, was insufficient to explain
the events of February. While admitting that most of the main SR and SD leaders
were not present, he claims that Social Democrats led the revolution in the sense
that people who had been influenced by their propaganda during recent years,
spread their radical ideas among their fellow workers and soldiers, thus acting as
catalysts for revolution. Tn every factory, in each guild, in each company, in each
tavern, in the military hospitals, among the troops of the garrison, the work of
revolutionary thought was in progress... in the working classes there was a^deep
process of growth, not only of hatred for the rulers, but of critical understanding
of their impotence. To the question, Who led the February revolution? we can
then answer definitely enough: conscious and tempered workers educated for
the most part by the party of Lenin.'15 N
Most recent Western historians have played down the role of the Bolsheviks in
the February revolution, pointing out that it is impossible to differentiate the
extent of Bolshevik influence from the influence of the SRs and Mensheviks, and
from the part played by underground workers’ and trade union groups. Some
surprising statistics have emerged from late Soviet sources which cast serious
doubts on how influential the Bolsheviks really were in February 1917. For
example in the Petrograd Soviet, the great forum of the most militant workers,
only 40 out of 600 deputies were Bolsheviks at the beginning of March 1917. Out
of 242 workers’ Soviets formed by the end of March, only 27 had a Bolshevik
majority.16 More emphasis is therefore laid on the contribution of worker activ
ists with no party affiliations, such as for example, the Labour group who became
increasingly militant and influential during the latter part of 1916, and who
joined in the call for a general strike on 9 January 1917. Christopher Read reaches
the conclusion that ‘workers were only weakly identified with political
parties... after all, there had only been some 150 Bolsheviks among the 26,000
workers at the Putilov factory in February.’ It was the issues at stake that really
mattered - the desire for better living ând working conditions and for more

control over their own lives.17 Diane Koenker was one of the first historians to
investigate the activities of factory workers, in her study of what was happening
in Moscow; she discovered that over 90 per cent of the strikes in Moscow factor
ies in 1917 included demands for higher wages and were clearly motivated by
economic issues.18 Steve Smith also emphasizes the economic context of the
revolution: ‘Western historians have been so mesmerized by the astonishing
political developments that they have failed to see the extent to which the crisis in
the economy underpinned the crisis in politics.' It was an outburst of desperation
to secure the basic material needs and a decent standard of living.19
In his meticulously detailed study of the events, Orlando Figes comes to the
conclusion that ‘the crowd violence of the February Days was not orchestrated
by any revolutionary party or movement. It was by and large a spontaneous reac
tion to the bloody repressions of the 26th, and an expression of the people's
long-felt hatred for the old regime.’ None of the main party leaders were present
either in Petrograd or Moscow - they were all in exile, in prison or abroad. Only
the second-rank leaders were there and they ‘chased after events, telephoning
from one apartment to another trying to find out what was happening on the
streets. It was only on the 27th when the revolution had become an established
fact, that the party leaders sprang into action.' Before then the real strike leaders
were the skilled and literate workers on the shop-floor, ‘daring young men in
their twenties and thirties, most of whom did not belong to any political
party... they resented the huge profits of their employers, and this increasingly
defined their sense of class solidarity with the unskilled workers, many of them
fresh from the countryside, who followed them into industrial battle. Here were
those unnamed leaders of the crowd during the February Days in Petrograd.’20
Richard Pipes highlights the role of the soldiers. He points out that, given the fact
that the February revolution is often portrayed as a workers’uprising, it is important
to stress that first and foremost it was a mutiny of peasant soldiers, whom the
authorities had unwisely billeted in overcrowded conditions in Petrograd. This,
according to one eye-witness, was ‘like kindling wood near a powder keg' (see
Document K). Since in the last resort the survival of the regime depended on the
loyalty of the army, the fact that these raw recruits and the embittered veterans
shared the same grievances as the workers was a fatal blow. Consequently, by the
end of the day on 27 February, ‘Petrograd was in the hands of peasants in uniform. '21
And finally Christopher Read gives yet another slant to the discussion. He
believes that the abdication of Nicholas was the culmination of the unrest in
Petrograd together with the nervous and incompetent blundering by the Duma
politicians and the generals. He stresses that the revolution was not simply spon
taneous. The elite played a vital role: whereas in 1905 they had remained united
in support of Nicholas, in February 1917 they were divided - in fact a majority of
them were prepared to drop him. Read also makes the point that the ‘spontan
eity’ was itself ‘created by tsarism's incorrigibly self-destructive tendencies. To
the very end, through its inflexibility and ineptness, the autocracy had been the
principal architect of its own downfall.'22 That was the tragedy of Nicholas II;
a more imaginative and flexible tsar might have reacted completely differently
and saved the monarchy; but Nicholas was trapped in a demanding role which
was completely beyond his limited capabilities.

Documents
Russian foreign policy
(A) Sergei Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister in 1914, later wrote about the
aims of Russian foreign polity.
Russia’s historical mission - the emancipation of the Christian peoples of the

Balkan peninsula from the Turkish yoke - was almost fulfilled by the beginning
of the twentieth century. Although these younger countries no longer needed
the guardianship of Russia, they were not strong enough to dispense with her
help in the event of any attempt upon their national existence by warlike
Teutonism. Serbia in particular was exposed to this danger, having become
the object of the decorously^ concealed covetousness of Austrian diplomacy.
Russia’s sole and unchanging object was to see that those Balkan peoples
should not fall under the influence of powers hostile to her. The ultimate aim
of Russian foreign policy was to obtain free access to the Mediterranean, and
to be in a position to defend her Black Sea coasts against the threat of the
irruption of hostile naval forces through the Bosphorus.
Source: quoted in Michael Lynch, Reaction and Revolutions: Russia 1881-1924, p. 60.
Russia during the First World W ar

(B) A Russian soldier describes an attack on an Austrian trench in December
1915.
After artillery preparation, we went about a mile forward under heavyNenemy

gunfire. Once we were within five hundred yards, we were hit, suddenly, by
devastating machine-gun and rifle-fire that had hitherto been silent. There was
the enemy, in solid trenches with great parapets and dug-outs; sitting behind
ten or fifteen rows of uncut wire, waiting for us. We lay on the frozen ground, for
hours, as the snow drifted down; if we were wounded there was no help because
we were so close to the wire. But behind us there were artillery colonels and
captains of the General Staff, drinking rum tea, and writing their reports - ‘After
brilliant artillery preparation our glorious forces rushed forward to occupy the
enemy trenches, but were held up by counter-attack of strong reserves.’
Source: quoted in Stone, p. 224.
(C) Extracts from two soldiers’ letters.
They still haven’t given out overcoats. We run around in thin topcoats. There
is not much to eat and what we get is fotd. Perhaps we’d be better off dead!

For the Tsar's inspection they prepared one company and collected all the
best uniforms from the other regiments for it to wear, leaving the rest of the
men in the trenches without boots, knapsacks, bandoliers, trousers, uniforms,
hats, or anything else.
Source: quoted in Figes, p. 263.
(D) Letter from the Empress Alexandra to Nicholas, 25 June 1915.
Deary,
I heard that that horrid Rodzianko & others went to Goremykin to beg the
Duma to be at once called together - oh please don't, it's not their business,
they want to discuss things not concerning them & bring more discontent -
they must be kept away - 1 assure you only harm will arise - they speak too
much. Russia, thank God, is not a constitutional country, tho' those creatures
try to play a part and meddle in affairs they dare not. Do not allow them to
press upon you. It’s fright if one gives in &their heads will go up.
Source, quoted in Bernard Pares, Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1914-1916 (London, 1923), p. 110.
(E) Letter to Nicholas from the War Committee of the Duma, 4 September 1915,
to which they received no reply.
Sire
We have learned that our valiant army, after losing more than four million
men killed, wounded or taken prisoner, is not only retreating but will perhaps
have to withdraw even further. We have also learned the reasons for this
retreat... that our army does not possess armaments of equal effectiveness as
the enemy.. .We have barely enough machine-guns to replace the ones we
have lost or have had to scrap... Furthermore though the enemy has plenty of
rifles, hundreds of thousands of our men are without weapons, and have to
wait until they can pick up the rifles dropped by their fallen comrades.
We have learned that appointments to important military posts have been
made in accordance with seniority or rank; it is thus neither bravery, nor tal
ent, nor competence, that is decisive in the promotion of candidates... really
able persons, true leaders of men who could lead our troops to victory, attain
only rarely the highest positions in the army. All these woes and muddles have
begun to affect the morale of the army and of the people.
Your Imperial Majesty! We make bold to say... that it is impossible to con
duct national defence successfully without a supreme authority that unites
everything. The Tsar can order the civil and military leaders to work out in
advance a plan of action and so put an end to these disordered moves that
look only a few days ahead and lack any underlying general idea.
Source: quoted in Ferro, pp. 164-7.

(F) Article by the Kadet politician, VA. Maklakov, in the newspaper Russkie
Vedomosti (Russian Record), September 1915.
A TRAGIC SITUATION: THE MAD CHAUFFEUR

Imagine that you are in a car that is racing headlong down a steep, narrow
road: one wrong turn and you will be gone for ever... Suddenly you realize
that the chauffeur cannot drive... he is carrying you and himself to destruc
tion. Fortunately, there are people in the car who know how to drive. Con
sequently it is necessary that they take over from the chauffeur as soon as
possible. But doing this is highly dangerous when the car is travelling at such a
speed. Moreover the chauffeur stubbornly refuses to give up the wheel. What
is to be done? One move of his hand could hurl the vehicle into the abyss. You
know that and so does he. And he laughs at your anguish and your helpless
ness. ‘You won’t dare touchme.’And he is right - you won’t dare. Not only will
you not interfere with him, you will help him with your advice. But how will
you feel if you realize that even with your help, the chauffeur cannot drive,
and if your mother, seeing the danger, begs you to help him and accuses you
of cowardly indifference?
(G) Speech by Paul Milyukov, the Kadet leader, to the Duma, November 1916.
We now see and know that we can no more legislate with this government
than we can lead Russia to victory with it. When the Duma declares again and
again that the home front must be organized for a successful war and the gov
ernment continues to insist that to organize the country means to organize
a revolution, and consciously chooses chaos and disintegration -n is this
stupidity or treason? (Voices from the left: 'treason’.) Moreover, when on the
basis of this general discontent the government deliberately busies itself with
provoking popular outbursts - for the involvement of the police in the spring
disturbances in the factories is proven - when provocation is used to incite
disturbances, knowing that they could be a reason for shortening the war - is
this done consciously or not? We say to this government, as the declaration of
the Progressive Bloc stated: we will fight you, we will fight by all legal means
until you go.
We have many different reasons for being discontented with this govern
ment. But all these reasons boil down to one general one: the incompetence
and evil intentions of the present government. This is Russia’s chief evil, and
victory over it will be equal to winning an entire campaign. And therefore in
the name of the millions of victims and of their spilled blood... we shall fight
until we get a responsible government which is in agreement with the general
principles of our programme. Cabinet members must agree unanimously as
to the most urgent tasks, they must agree and be prepared to implement the
programme of the Duma. A Cabinet which does not satisfy these conditions
88 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rihsiän History

does not deserve the confidence of the Duma and should go. (Voices: ‘bravo’;
loud and prolonged applause.)
Source: quoted in John Laver, Russia 1914-41, pp. 6-7.
The February revolution

(H) Petrograd Police report dated January 1917.
The proletariat here are on the verge of despair. It is thought that the slightest
explosion, due to the least of pretexts, will result in uncontrollable riots...
The cost of living, which has trebled, the impossibility of finding food, the loss
of time through queuing for hours outside shops, the rising death rate, the
restrictions imposed on the workers, have become unbearable. The ban on
moving from one factory to another or changing one’s job has reduced the
workers to the level of cattle fit only to serve as cannon-fodder. The ban on all
meetings, even meetings held to form co-operatives or to organize canteens,
and the ban on trade unions are causing the workers to adopt an openly
hostile attitude towards the government.
(I) Proclamation by the Petrograd Central Workers' Group, 26 January 1917. The
following day all the group's leaders were arrested.
Ending the war will not improve the situation of the working class if it is car
ried out not by the people themselves but by the autocratic authority. Peace
achieved by the monarchy will bring yet more terrible chains. The working
class and democracy can wait no longer. Every day that is allowed to pass
brings danger: the decisive removal of the autocratic regime and the complete
democratization of the country are tasks that must be solved without delay.
Source: quoted in Pipes, p. 270.
(J) Impressions of the February Days by Pitirim Sorokin, a sociology lecturer at

the university in Petrograd, and a Socialist Revolutionary.
It has come at last. About three o'clock one of my students rushed in with the
news that two regiments, armed and carrying red flags, had left their barracks
and were marching on the Duma, there to unite with the workmen. Hastily
leaving the house we hurried... to the central part of the city. As we turned
into the Liteinyi the crowd grew larger and much louder grew the sound of
{continued)

the guns. The frantic efforts of the police to disperse the crowds were utterly
without effect...
We fiirally reached the Tauride Palace. The hall of the Duma presented
a striking contrast to the tumult without. Here was comfort, dignity, order -
the hall and corridors were packed with people. Soldiers behind rifles and
machine-guns were there, but order still prevailed. The street had not yet
broken in ...
‘What's the latest?' I asked of a deputy shouldering his way through the mass.
‘Rodzianko is trying to get into communication with the Tsar. The Committee
is discussing the organization of a new ministry responsible jointly to the Tsar
and to the Duma.'
Ts anybody in control and regulation of this revolution?'
‘Nobody. It is developing spontaneously.'
‘How about the monarchy and the Tsar?'
T know absolutely nothing.’>
‘Too bad if even you don’t know about these things,’I remarked sarcastically...
Outside people were growing hysterical with excitement and the police had
retreated. Wild speeches and shrieks of applause filled the air. Excited in spite
of myself, I too listened and applauded, and it was midnight before I could
tear myself away.
Source: quoted in R. Pethybridge, Witnesses to the Russian Revolution, pp. 113-18.
(K) Mikhail Rodzianko, the President of the Duma, gives his account of events.
Unexpectedly for all, there erupted a soldier mutiny such as I have never seen.
These, of course, were not soldiers but muzhiki [peasants] taken directly from
the plough who have found it useful now to make known their muzhik
demands. In the crowd all one could hear was ‘Land and Freedom’^ ‘Down
with the dynasty’, ‘Down with the Romanovs’, ‘Down with the officers'. In
many units officers were beaten. This was joined by the workers and anarchy
reached its apogee.
Source: quoted in Pipes, p. 278.
Notes
1. David M. McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900-1914, gives
a good general survey of foreign policy.
2. J.N. Westwood, Russia against Japan, is probably the best recent account of the Russo-
Japanese War.
3. Quoted in Peter Waldron, The End o f Imperial Russia, 1855-1917, p. 122.
4. Dominic Lieven, Russia and the Origins o f the First World War is still an excellent account
of how Russia became involved in the war.
5. Fritz Fischer, Germanÿs Aims in the First World War.
6. Norman Stone, The Eàstern Front, 1914-1917 (1998 edition), pp. 236-54.
7. Leon Trotsky, The History o f the Russian Résolution, p. 41.

8. Stone, pp. 208-11.
9. Robert Service, The Russian Revolution, 1900-1927 (1999 edition), pp. 29-30.
10. T. Hasegawa, ‘The February Revolution’, in Acton, Chemiaev and Rosenberg (editors),
Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914-1921, p. 49.
11. T. Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917; details in this section from
pp. 232-8,247-55,267-9.
12. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution (1966 edition), vol. 1, p. 81.
13. George Katkov, Russia 1917-th e February Revolution.
14. W.H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution (1965 edition), vol. 1, p. 73.
15. Trotsky, pp. 169-71.
16. For a detailed analysis of the different interpretations see Edward Acton, Rethinking the
Russian Revolution, pp. 107-28.
17. Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets, p. 90.
18. Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the Revolution o f l 917, p. 304.
19. Steve Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-18, p. 145.
20. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 301,322-4.
21. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919, pp. 278,281.
22. Read, pp. 44-5.
■ ü 4 The failure o f the
Provisional Governm ent
and the Bolshevik seizure o f
power, February-O ctober 1917
Summary of events
March 1917 Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet formed
When the abdication of Nicholas II was announced and the Romanov monarchy
came to such an unexpected end, the leaders of the Progressive Bloc formed
what they called a Provisional Government with Prince Lvov at its head. Their
intention was to introduce necessary reforms and prepare for democratic elec
tions to choose a Constituent Assembly or parliament. The workers and soldiers
of Petrograd elected their own representatives to the Petrograd Soviet. This
meant that there was a dual power in the capital: the Provisional Government
of the Duma members which was supported by the middle and uppçr classes,
and the Petrograd Soviet which had the support of the working classes, soldiers
and the revolutionary parties - Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Social Democrats,
who were divided into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. The two bodies agreed to
work together to continue fighting the war, but it was an uneasy relationship.
April
• At the beginning of the month Lenin arrived in Petrograd from Switzerland,
after travelling through Germany in what was described as a ‘sealed’ train. He
immediately published his April Theses setting out what he thought the
Bolsheviks’ aims should be, and insisting that the Bolsheviks must cease all
co-operation with the Provisional Government.•
• Towards the end of April there were demonstrations in Petrograd against the
government and against the continuation of the war. In an attempt at com
promise Prince Lvov formed a coalition, bringing six of the socialist leaders
from the Petrograd Soviet into the government. Alexander Kerensky, a socialist
lawyer, became Minister for War. No Bolsheviks joined the government.

Figure 4.1 The [July Days ' in Petrograd, 1917. Provisional Government troops fire on
a demonstration in the Nevsky Prospekt.
During the summer of 1917 nothing went right for the Provisional Government
• The war dragged on; Kerensky began a new offensive against the Austrians in
Galicia (16 June), and although there were some initial successes, the Russians
were forced to retreat, with heavy losses, when German troops arrived to help
the Austrians.
• The economic situation continued to deteriorate and the government's popu
larity waned rapidly.
• The July Days - on 3 July there was a huge demonstration of workers, soldiers
and sailors, many of whom were from Kronstadt, the naval base on an island
in the estuary of the river Neva, just off Petrograd. They marched on the Tauride
Palace where both the government and the Petrograd Soviet were meeting,
and demanded that the Soviet take over. The Soviet refused to take the respon
sibility and the government brought loyal troops from the front to restore
order. The Bolsheviks were accused of stirring up the trouble and trying to
seize power. The government reported, falsely, that Lenin was a German
agent. At this, public support for the Bolsheviks quickly declined; some of the
leaders were arrested, and Lenin fled to Finland. About 400 people had been
killed during the violence of these ‘July Days'.
• Prince Lvov, deeply shocked by the ‘July Days', resigned as head of the
government and was replaced by Kerensky. However, the situation in Russia
became steadily worse: unrest and frustration mounted, the economy was in
deep crisis, unemployment was rising and real wages were falling.
August: The Kornilov affair

There was a further disaster on 21 August when the Germans captured Riga, only
300 miles from Petrograd. The popularity of the Bolsheviks soon revived, since they
Failure of the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik seizure of power 93

were the only party not tainted by the failures of the Provisional Government.
There was confusion in Petrograd: troops sent by the army supreme commander,
General Kornilov, advanced towards the city, apparently intending to take over
from Kerensky and set up a military dictatorship. However, Kornilov’s real inten
tions are still a subject of debate among historians. Kerensky announced that
a right-wing coup was in progress; he dismissed Kornilov, allowed arms to be
distributed to the workers of Petrograd, and released most of the imprisoned
Bolsheviks. Kornilov’s troops began to desert and he was eventually arrested.
September-October: Bolshevik influence grows

• The so-called Kornilov rising had important results: it convinced workers and
soldiers that there was a real danger of a counter-revolution and that the
Bolsheviks were the only party that could be relied on to act independently in
their interests.
• On 31 August the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet for the first
time, and by late September they were in a majority in the Moscow Soviet as well.
• Lenin returned in secret to Petrograd early in October and convinced the
Central Committee of the Bolshevik party that now was the time to attempt to
seize power. Using forces acting in the name of the Soviet, the Bolsheviks
took over the important points in the city (24-25 October). The ministers of
the Provisional Government were arrested, except Kerensky who escaped, and
it was announced that all power was in the hands of the Soviets.
• Were the Bolsheviks planning to seize power by armed force during the
July Days, or were they taken by surprise by a spontaneous uprising?
• Was there a Kornilov coup attempt or did Kerensky invent it?
• Did the Bolsheviks achieve power in October by a coup, without much
popular support, or were they swept into power by the social and economic
concerns of the masses which gave them a huge basis of popular support?
4.1 The failure of the Provisional Government

(a) The Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet
After the revolution of February/March the vast majority of people in Russia who
had any views about the situation probably expected a democratic parliamentary
republic to emerge. Even strict Marxists like the Mensheviks believed that the
country would be ruled by a bourgeois liberal government until the industrial
working class had become large and powerful enough to take control itself. This,
it was assumed, would take years rather than months. However, the Provisional
Government failed to consolidate its position, and only eight months later the
Bolsheviks, still only a small party in February, were able to take power. One of
the main reasons for the failure of the Provisional Government was that from the

very beginning of its existence it had to function alongside the Petrograd Soviet -
they even met in the same building, the Tauride Palace. The Soviet, the elected
representatives of the workers and soldiers, had a great deal of power; via the
trade unions they controlled all the railways in the Petrograd area, together with
all postal and telegraph services. They had set up committees to deal with food
supplies and military matters, and they published their own newspaper Izvestiya
(News). There was a network of Soviets throughout the country and in June
a national conference was held - the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets; this
body had a Central Executive Committee (known as Ispolkom) which did its best
to undermine the Provisional Government. The Petrograd Soviet and Ispolkom
acted as self-appointed ‘watchdogs' of the revolution.
Although Prince Lvov was the Prime Minister, probably the most influential
member of the government was Paul Milyukov, the Kadet leader. The Soviet sup
ported what was basically the Kadet programme of full civil rights, including
freedom of the press, speech, assembly and religion, the right to strike, the aboli
tion of the death penalty and an amnesty for all political and religious prisoners.
Also promised were elections for a Constituent Assembly based on the principle
of votes for everybody and a secret ballot. It was decided to set up a militia to take
the place of the police, and the government ruled that none of the 250,000
soldiers of the Petrograd garrison were to be disarmed or moved from the city.
This last point was included on the insistence of the Soviet and Ispolkom because
the troops in Petrograd had helped to carry out the revolution and would con
tinue to defend it, whereas troops brought in from elsewhere might be unreli
able. On the same day that this programme was announced (1 March), the Soviet
issued what it called Army Order Number One (see Document A): troops were to
obey orders given to them by the government only after they had been approved
by the Soviet Soldiers and sailors were urged to set up their own committees
which would take over control of all arms from the officers. A few days later Army
Order Number Two gave soldiers the right to sack and replace their own com
manders. These orders were a serious blow for the government because it meant
that if any major policy disagreement arose, in the last resort it could not rely on
the loyalty of the army. It wasn’t long before there was a major disagreement over
the conduct of the war and the question of war aims (see next section).
Given that it was apparently so powerful, why didn't the Petrograd Soviet take
control during the summer of 1917? After all, as the elected representatives of the
soldiers and sailors, they had a better claim to legitimacy than the Provisional
Government - the remnants of the Fourth Duma which had been elected on
a very limited franchise. The reason was that most of the members of the Soviet
were extremely cautious. The Mensheviks were sticking to their strict Marxist
views that the February Revolution was the expected bourgeois revolution, and
that this must be consolidated before the workers' revolution could take place.
They thought it was vital for them to co-operate with the liberal Provisional Gov
ernment, at least for the time being. After all, times were difficult - it was better for
the liberals to take the responsibility, and the blame, if necessary. The Mensheviks
were happy to take the role of watchdog over the government, making sure that
the workers’ interests were looked after. The Socialist Revolutionaries, who drew
most of their support from the peasants, were the largest party in the Soviet. But
Failure of the Provisional Government and th e Bolshevik seizure of power 95

they were divided into a right wing Which was prepared to support the govern
ment, a left wing, led by Maria Spiridonova, which gradually drifted towards the
Bolsheviks, and a centre which couldn't make up its mind. Until Lenin arrived in
Petrograd at the beginning of April even the Bolsheviks were content to let the
Provisional Government have its way. Two major concerns among all these groups
were firstly, that the middle of a war was the worst possible time for inexperienced
politicians to take over the running of a country; and secondly, that if the Soviet
took power in their own name, they would lose the support of the moderate bour
geoisie; these would then join the right wing reactionaries who might be provoked
into launching a military coup to bring the revolution to an end.
Early in May the situation began to change: serious splits developed in the
Soviet when some of its members joined the government. Prince Lvov took six
socialists into his cabinet, including Viktor Chernov, the SR leader, and two leading
Mensheviks, Irakli Tsereteli and Mikhail Skobelev. However, they were unable to
change the government’s policies to any great extent. In mid-June the government
ordered some of the Petrograd regiments to the front, ostensibly to reinforce
the faltering Kerensky offensive; the real reason was to get them away from
Petrograd where they were seen as a major threat to the government. This breach
of the promise not to move any of the garrison from the city outraged the troops,
and many of their unit committees voted to overthrow the Provisional Government
in an armed uprising. By the end of 3 July Petrograd was virtually in the hands of
the soldiers, workers and Kronstadt sailors supported by many rank-and-file
Bolsheviks. The following day an armed crowd of around 50,000 besieged the
Tauride Palace brandishing placards bearing the slogan 'All Power to the Soviets’.
When Chernov tried to calm the crowd he was roughly handled and almost
lynched before he was rescued by Trotsky. A worker from the Putilov factory
shouted in his face: 'Take power you son of a bitch when they give it to you.’
Power was there for the taking but the Soviet, including the Bolshevik leaders,
shrank from the fateful step; Lenin himself was not convinced that this was the
right time - premature action could be disastrous. It was clear that the masses
were far more militant than the Soviet and the leaders of the Bolsheviks, the only
party which claimed to be in favour of insurrection; but without decisive leader
ship, the crowds didn’t know how to make the unwilling Soviet take power.
Confused and leaderless, they began to disperse, and in the evening loyal troops
arrived from the front to restore order.
There has been a lively debate about what really happened during the July
Days. Richard Pipes is convinced that Lenin and the Bolsheviks planned the
whole affair from the beginning. He claims that it was the Bolsheviks who stirred
up the garrison troops with a ‘furious propaganda campaign urging them to
refuse to go to the front. No country with a tradition of democracy would have
tolerated such incitement to mutiny in time of war.’ The Bolshevik Central
Committee passed a resolution calling for the overthrow of the Provisional
Government by armed force. The plan was that troops would arrest the Soviet
Executive, whereupon Lenin would proclaim the new Soviet government, which
would in reality be a Bolshevik government. Pipes claims that Lenin lost his
nerve at the critical moment because he could not decide whether or not it was
the right time. Pipes believes that thevinsurrection was Lenin’s worst mistake,
96 Mastering Twentieth-Century ^ s i a n History

which could easily have caused the destruction of the Bolshevik party. He argues
that to absolve themselves of responsibility, the Bolsheviks went to unusual
lengths to ‘misrepresent the July putsch as a spontaneous demonstration which
they sought to direct into peaceful channels.’1
However, the evidence for this theory is far from conclusive; much more convin
cing is the argument that it was a spontaneous uprising. Although it was supported
by the majority of rank-and-file Bolsheviks, the party leadership was much too cau
tious to be planning a coup. According to another American historian, Alexander
Rabinowitch, the Bolshevik Central Committee seems to have spent most of its
time trying to restrain the ordinary rank-and-file party members. It only issued its
resolution calling for the armed overthrow of the government under pressure from
the militants; even then it had no intention of the Bolsheviks taking power alone,
but was hoping that a show of force would be enough to persuade the Soviet to take
control2As for Lenin, he was reluctant to speak in public, and on his only appear
ance he made a very short speech in which he failed to give the crowds any detailed
instructions, except to remain calm and to keep the demonstrations peaceful. It
seems unlikely that he would have been so hesitant if he had genuinely intended
from the beginning to overthrow the government. Robert Service’s view is that he
was weighing up the pros and cons of a gamble: ‘it was more likely by far that he
was improvising and that he was testing the waters with the aim of discovering the
strength of force and determination that the Provisional Government retained.’ By
the time he came to make his speech, he had reached the conclusion that it was too
early to launch a violent uprising and that the leaders of the Bolshevik Military
Organization and the Kronstadt Bolsheviks (who were in a majority in the Kronstadt
Soviet) had been acting irresponsibly. Turning to the ones who were with him, he
told them: ‘You ought to be given a good hiding for this!’3Lenin was probably also
influenced by the knowledge that the government was about to denounce the
Bolsheviks as German agents, which would not exactly get a newly proclaimed
Bolshevik government off to an auspicious start
After the July crisis and the resignation of Lvov, Kerensky formed a government
made up of eight mainly right-wing socialists (from the Soviet) and seven non
socialists. But although it might appear to the outsider that the socialists had
succeeded in capturing control of the country, in reality the government's policies
changed very little. The situation with the war and the collapsing economy was so
disastrous that the socialists simply dare not try anything dramatic; they knew that
if they did, they would arouse the bitter opposition of industrialists, landowners
and the army command. Having committed themselves to this compromise with
the liberals, the Soviet-based members of the government now had to bear the
responsibility for their failures. The workers and soldiers of Petrograd and many of
the peasant SR supporters were becoming increasingly exasperated with the
caution of the moderate socialists and were pressing for more militant action. The
only alternative was to turn to the Bolsheviks whose popularity gradually recovered
after the crisis of the ‘July Days’. By September Kerensky and his government were
becoming increasingly isolated between, on the one hand, the counter-revolutionary
forces of the right, particularly most of the army high command, and on the other,
the Bolsheviks, together with their left SR supporters, who claimed to have answers
to the problems of the war and the economy and who presented themselves as the

chief defenders of the revolution. So long as the war and its associated failures
continued, the Provisional Government would be in grave difficulties.
(b) The Provisional Government continues the war

Unfortunately for the Provisional Government, there could be no return to
normality while the country was still at war. If peace could have been made
within the first few weeks after the February revolution, the government would
have been able to give all its attention to the pressing problems of the economy
and the preparations for democratic elections. The left called for a negotiated
peace based on the principle of no annexations of occupied territory. However,
since it was hardly likely that the Germans would agree to hand back all their
conquests, there seemed no alternative but to continue fighting. The new govern
ment was anxious to show solidarity with Russia’s Western allies, who expected
that the removal of the Tsar would bring about an immediate improvement in the
war effort. After all, the Provisional Government, professing as it did to be a demo
cratic government, would not want to be accused of abandoning its democratic
allies who were fighting German and Austro-Hungarian autocracy. There were
also suggestions that the government’s ulterior motive in continuing the war was
to keep as many peasants as possible away from home for as long as possible in
order to reduce the danger of mass land seizures, and, in the case of Kerensky’s
summer offensive, to find something useful for the Petrograd garrison to do.4
It wasn’t long before disagreements arose about the conduct of the war. The
Soviet supported the decision to continue fighting, but only to the extent of recap
turing lost territory and defending Russian lands from further invasion. They were
not prepared to tolerate what they called an ‘imperialist’war involving the capture
and annexation of enemy territory. Chernov, the SR leader, insisted that the For
eign Minister, Milyukov, should send the allies a declaration of Russia’s war aims
which had been drafted by the Soviet, and which called for a lasting peace based
on the ‘self-determination of nations’and a renunciation of all annexationist claims
by all the combatants. Milyukov was worried in case this gave the allies tfte impres
sion that Russia was prepared to make a separate peace. He added a secret note to
the declaration assuring the allies that Russia still stood by her obligations, which
presumably included keeping to the secret treaty signed in 1915 promising Russia
Constantinople and the Straits once the Central Powers were defeated.
When the ‘secret’ note was published there was uproar in the Soviet and among
the left at this revelation of the government's ‘imperialism’. There were massive
protest demonstrations supported by troops from the garrison, and soon afterwards
Milyukov resigned (2 May). Soldiers at the front were bitterly disappointed, since
they had expected peace to follow very soon after the Tsar abdicated. Normal
discipline and order began to break down, especially now that there was no death
penalty to deter would-be mutineers. By April a system of soldier-officer com
mittees from company level upwards had been set up and accepted by the High
Command, since it seemed to be the only way of restoring some sort of order. Each
committee at the front usually consisted of four soldiers and one officer from every
division; many of the.lower officers were socialists who became predominant in
the leadership. Bolsheviks and other socialists played a significant role in committee
98 Mastering Twentieth-Century (Julian History

activity and seemed to work well together during March and April. However, when
Kerensky and the other socialists entered the cabinet, they committed themselves
to the continuation of the war. This placed the soldier-officer committees in a dif
ficult situation: the officers felt they must try to support their fellow socialists in
government by trying to enforce discipline, whereas the rank-and-file peasant and
working-class soldiers continued to press for peace, neglecting routine military
duties and fraternizing with the Germans. When Kerensky’s plans for an offensive
became known, this gave the Bolsheviks their opportunity; ‘Bolshevik agitation
against the war at the front, which was a trickle in early May, became a flood by
early June. Whole regiments mutinied, disobeyed orders on troop movements, and
committed violence against their officers.’5
Public opinion too began to turn decisively against the war; each military setback
caused a crisis on the home front and led to dwindling support for the Provisional
Government General Brusilov was convinced that the mood of the troops did not
augur well for the June offensive (see Document B), but the government insisted
that it should go ahead. Its failure was a bitter blow - thousands of troops were
killed and thousands more ran away when the Germans counter-attacked. The offi
cial number of deserters during the offensive was 170,000, but the actual number
was very much larger. At a meeting of one of the soldiers’ committees somebody
asked the question: ‘What’s the use of invading Galicia anyway? Why the hell do
we need to take another hilltop when we can make peace at the bottom?’ Some
soldiers shot their officers rather than fight the Germans. When the government
tried to reinforce the army by bringing some of the garrison troops from Petrograd,
that precipitated the crisis of early July and the resignation of Prince Lvov (see
section 4.1(a)). The capture of Riga by the Germans on 21 August threw Petrograd
into a panic and was quickly followed by the Kornilov Affair (see section 4.1(d)).
The war hampered the government in other ways: it prevented any decisive
action on land reform and it delayed elections for a Constituent Assembly. Or per
haps the politicians were using the war as an excuse for their inaction. Either way
it did nothing to make the war or the government any more popular. A committee
was set up to investigate the land situation, but the problem was how to organize
the redistribution of land when so many peasants were away in the army. If they
heard that estates were being carved up and handed out in their absence, there
were likely to be mass desertions of peasant soldiers walking home to make sure
that they didn’t miss out. In some areas peasants soon grew tired of waiting for
government action and began to seize land; on 8 April Prince Lvov gave local
authorities permission to use troops to suppress disorders in rural areas. When
Viktor Chernov, the SR leader, became Minister of Agriculture in May, he quietly
allowed peasants to take over unused land, but the liberals in the government
prevented him from introducing any general land reform policy.
It was almost the end of May before a council was formed to draw up legis
lation for the new electoral system, and even then progress was slow. They had
problems deciding on which type of proportional representation to adopt and
how to organize things so that around seven million troops and civilians still at
the front could vote. The Kadets did their best to prolong the discussions since it
was clear that they had no chance of winning a genuinely democratic election.
This delay played into the hands of the Bolsheviks, enabling them to tell the

public, with some apparent justification, that the government had no intention
of holding elections and that the revolution was at an end. It was eventually
announced that the elections would take place on 12 November, but by then the
Bolsheviks had taken power.
(c) Economic chaos grows

Some historians see this as the major reason for the failure of the Provisional
Government, though like so much else, it can be attributed to the continuation of
the war. Inflation continued to soar, especially in the towns and cities where high
grain prices were the main problem. In March the government tried to deal with
the problem by introducing a state monopoly on the purchase of grain in order
to keep supplies flowing and prices stable. This failed because peasants refused
to sell their grain at the prices offered; they preferred to feed it to their livestock
or consume it themselves, since the largest slice of profits was taken by the
dealers who transported it to the urban areas. Prices of manufactured goods
were so far above the prices that the peasants received for their produce that they
preferred to revert to subsistence. In September the government was forced to
double the price offered, but by this time the rouble was worth only 10 per cent of
its 1914 value. Although wages increased, they lagged far behind price increases,
and this led to demands for even higher wages. In some places traders refused to
accept the almost worthless paper money and worked on a barter system.
By the autumn the economy was collapsing: towns and cities were starving;
production of war materials had fallen by half and the army was approaching the
point where it would be unable to fight even if it wanted to. There was a transport
crisis with one train in four out of order. Hundreds of firms had been forced to close
down, giving as their reasons shortages of raw materials and fuel, lack of orders and
excessive wage demands. Meanwhile in the countryside peasants continued to
seize land, livestock, farm equipment and stocks of timber and hay. In most areas
this was carried out in an orderly way by the mir which formally took possession of
the new land and divided it up among the villagers. This was embarrassing for the
SRs who supported the principle of land seizure but wanted it carried out by local
land committees. The government repeatedly warned peasants not to take matters
into their own hands, but their warnings were ignored and they lacked the means
to do anything about it. The government had lost all control of the economic
system, and the situation was so dire that, in the words of Norman Stone, ‘the way
was open to Lenin, who promised a new system altogether. Economic chaos drove
Russia towards Bolshevism, sometimes despite the Bolsheviks/6
(d) The growing popularity of the Bolsheviks -

the Kornilov Affair
From being a minority party in February 1917 the Bolsheviks gradually attracted
more support; but it was not a smooth process - public opinion fluctuated, and
after the ‘July Days’ many people thought the party was finished. Yet by October
they had a majority in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets and in the All-Russia
Congress of Soviets. The first important milestone was the publication of Lenin’s

April Theses, an aggressive and uncompromising document containing ten urgent
proposals. He claimed that the leaders of the Soviet were completely misguided
to co-operate with the Provisional Government; they had sold out to bourgeois
capitalism; support for it should cease immediately and the misplaced confi
dence that the masses had in the government should be destroyed. Lenin claimed
that the situation had already gone beyond the parliamentary democracy stage;
the Soviets, under real revolutionary leadership, should now play the vital role in
shifting power from the bourgeoisie to the workers. He urged that the power of
the Soviets must be built up and that the Bolsheviks should do all they could to
increase their membership of the Soviets. ‘All Power to the Soviets’ was one of his
slogans - the Soviets must take control of the state, thus fulfilling the next stage
in Marx’s pattern. Another slogan was ‘Peace, Bread and Land'. ‘Peace’ meant
immediate withdrawal from the capitalist war, and therefore was only possible
after the capitalist government had been overthrown. ‘Land’ meant the seizure
of large estates and their transference into state ownership. Another task of the
party was to create a revolutionary international movement; Lenin believed that
the proletarian revolution in Russia would spark off similar movements in other
countries - the socialist revolution in Russia could only be fully successful as part
of a world-wide movement.
When Lenin first presented these ideas in a speech to a gathering of Social
Democrats in the Tauride Palace there was uproar. The Mensheviks heckled and
booed and even the Bolsheviks themselves were stunned. They had already com
mitted themselves to support the Provisional Government, assuming that the
bourgeois stage would last for some considerable time, and were hoping for
a reconciliation with the Mensheviks, with whom they were already working quite
amicably in the provincial Soviets. But here was Lenin talking about abandoning
‘the old Bolshevism' and reducing the Marxist two-stage revolutionary process
into one all-inclusive revolution at the end of which ‘the proletariat and the poor
est peasants’ would have taken power. According to most reports Lenin was not
dismayed by his reception - he had expected a struggle, and now he set about con
verting the party to support the April Theses. He threw himself into the campaign
with incredible energy and will-power, speaking at mass meetings, writing articles
for the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda (Truth), circulating pamphlets and cajoling
the Bolshevik Central Committee. He was prepared to modify his slogans and
ideas but even so, his programme was far more radical than that of any other party.
He called for the nationalization of large-scale industry and banks, and insisted
that only a genuinely socialist government run by the Soviets could achieve peace.
At a conference of elected Bolshevik delegates held during the last week in April
there was a remarkable turnaround - the delegates voted overwhelmingly to back
the April Theses; less than a month after returning from abroad, Lenin was firmly in
control of the party. His next struggle would be to win over the general public.
Events greatly helped the Bolsheviks: in May when the Mensheviks and SRs
joined the government, many of their supporters were bitterly disappointed and
began to turn towards the Bolsheviks, the only party which was anti-war and
pro-working class. Lenin and the Bolsheviks took every opportunity to make use
of the growing disillusionment among the masses and to spread the main points
of the party programme. They used the factory committees, the trade unions, the
Failure of the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik seizure o f power 10 1

Soviets (of which there were around 9Ö0 by the autumn of 1917) and the Bolshevik
newspapers; and of course diere were more speeches in the Petrograd Soviet and
the First All Russia Congress of Soviets held in June (see Document D). To gain the
support of the peasants they dropped the idea of land nationalization and offered
peasants more or less a free hand to divide the land up as they chose. There is
evidence that this new attitude to the land question produced quite a marked
swing to the Bolsheviks in the countryside, where previously they had had very
little support. Peasants were losing patience with the over-cautious Social Revo
lutionaries; in fact many left-wing SRs were splitting away from the main body
and moving towards the Bolsheviks. In the larger cities the Bolsheviks formed
militia groups, a sort of Bolshevik private army consisting of workers armed with
rifles; by July there were about 10,000 of them in Petrograd. The message was clear
and simple - the Bolshevik party was the vanguard of the movement which would
guide the mass of the workers, soldiers and peasants towards the socialist revo
lution. This revolution woulcLtake place when the Bolsheviks had gained a majority
in the Soviets; this would show that public opinion was on their side and that the
workers and soldiers were ready to take power.
The fiasco of the ‘July Days’ (see section 4.1 (a)) was a temporary setback for the
Bolsheviks. They had talked about insurrection, but when the Bolshevik sailors at
the Kronstadt naval base had taken the initiative, the party leadership more or less
disowned them. Worse still, the government was able to blame the Bolsheviks for
the ‘July Days’, and accused them of being in the pay of the Germans and working
for the defeat of Russia. It was tme that the party had received cash from the
Germans who were prepared to try anything which might destabilize the Provi
sional Government; this was the reason they had allowed Lenin and his party of
supporters to travel back to Russia through Germany in the ‘sealed’ trainÂfter
the publication of the April Theses it was in Germany’s interests to ease the way
for a Bolshevik government, since they were the only party in Russia pledged to
bring about a quick end to the war. In fact the amounts of cash involved were not
large, but the right-wing press made the most of them. The government ordered
the arrest of twelve Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin, and prepared to charge
them with high treason. About 800 Bolsheviks were arrested altogether and the
offices of Pravda were raided and closed down. The popularity of the Bolsheviks,
especially among the troops, plummeted for the time being, and although Lenin
himself escaped to Finland, Kerensky, who became leader of the Provisional Gov
ernment soon afterwards, believed that the Bolshevik threat had been permanently
removed.
Kerensky saw himself as a man of destiny and the saviour of Russia, and he
soon began to act almost like a dictator.7 He took up residence in the Winter
Palace, slept in Alexander Ill's bed and worked at his ‘swimming-pool sized’
desk. He never took the Bolsheviks seriously enough, and believed that they were
only a threat because their extremism encouraged a counter-revolutionary back
lash, especially among those right-wingers who wanted to restore the monarchy.
It was no doubt for this reason that he had the royal family secretly moved to
Tobolsk in Siberia. Once Nicholas was safely out of the way, Kerensky felt he
could afford to be lenient with the Bolsheviks. Eventually they were all released
and the charges against them dropped.^

It was the counter-revolutionary backlash in the shape of the Kornilov Affair8
which helped the rapid revival of Bolshevik fortunes. The leaders of industry, busi
ness, commerce and finance were becoming increasingly worried at the apparent
breakdown of law and order. In August they held a conference in Moscow at which
they were joined by right-wing politicians and army officers, and they agreed that
the most important step was to destroy the Soviets, especially the Petrograd Soviet,
which they saw as the root of the revolution. There was another Moscow con
ference arranged by Kerensky later in the month and attended by representatives
of all parties except the Bolsheviks. No agreement was reached but the most sig
nificant outcome was that General Kornilov, whom Kerensky had appointed as
Commander-in-Chief of the Army, emerged as the leader of the right. Described by
one of his colleagues as having ‘the heart of a lion and the brain of a sheep,'
Kornilov seems genuinely to have seen himself as the man to save Russia from the
chaos. He believed that the key to success was to restore discipline in the army and
he urged Kerensky to restore the death penalty for soldiers disobeying orders and
deserting. Kerensky obliged but Kornilov demanded more - he wanted the death
penalty restored at the rear as well, which would apply, for example, to reserves
waiting to move up to the front. He wanted soldiers’ committees banned and pol
itical agitators removed, and he remarked to one of his aides around this time: ‘The
time has come to hang the German agents and spies headed by Lenin, and to
disperse the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies so that it can never reas
semble.’ However, these demands placed Kerensky in a difficult situation since he
knew that the Petrograd Soviet would never agree to them. Some reports say that
he wanted to introduce the measures and that the cabinet had discussed moving
loyal troops into Petrograd to eliminate the Soviet when the new disciplinary
measures were announced; but no decision on this had been taken.
What happened next is still not clear, and several different accounts have been
produced. What seems to be beyond dispute is that a number of people on the
right were urging Kornilov to carry out a military coup to remove both the
Petrograd Soviet and Kerensky. The day after the Germans captured Riga, Kornilov
ordered some of his troops to move to Petrograd. According to Christopher Read,
‘Kornilov was deploying his most reliable troops with a view to suppressing the
Petrograd Soviet, even paying agents provocateurs to start disorders in the capital
as a pretext for his actions.'9 However, what is not known for certain is whether
Kornilov intended to overthrow Kerensky as well as suppress the Soviet. Also
unclear is how far Kerensky supported Kornilov; certainly Kerensky would have
been glad to get rid of the Soviet, and may well have given Kornilov the impression
that he wanted him to go ahead.
Things were complicated by a go-between or mediator, Vladimir Lvov, who
told Kerensky that he had heard rumours that Kornilov intended to set himself
up as dictator. Horrified, Kerensky, who was in Petrograd, contacted Kornilov,
who was still at army headquarters at Mogilev, by telegraph, to ask him if Lvov’s
story was true. Without bothering to check with Kerensky exactly what Lvov had
told him, Kornilov said that it was true. After a short conversation full of misun
derstandings, Kerensky decided that Lvov must have been telling the truth and
ordered Kornilov to halt the advance on Petrograd. On 26 August he sent a tele
gram dismissing Kornilov from his post, but Kornilov refused to be dismissed,
afterwards claiming that he thought Kerensky was acting under duress and that
the Bolsheviks must already have taken over Petrograd (see Document C). Another
reason which has been suggested for Kornilov's refusal to be dismissed is that he
believed Kerensky had suffered some sort of breakdown, was no longer fit to rule
and must be replaced.
As Kornilov’s troops continued their advance, Kerensky appealed to the Soviet
for help. Arms were distributed to workers and Red Guards, printers stopped the
publication of newspapers supporting Kornilov, and railway workers diverted
troop trains. Brigades of workers went out to talk to the troops and eventually they
refused to march to Petrograd. The coup fizzled out without a shot being fired
and on 2 September Kornilov, who was still at army headquarters, was arrested.
After studying the tapes of the telegraph conversations between Kerensky and
Kornilov, Richard Pipes concludes that to begin with, Kornilov had never intended
a coup - misunderstandings arose because of the interfering Lvov, and then these
were used by Kerensky to discredit Kornilov and enhance his own crumbling
authority. It was only when Kornilov felt he had been betrayed by Kerensky that
he decided to disobey orders.10
Whatever the truth about the intentions of Kornilov and Kerensky, the results
were beyond doubt: the right was thrown into confusion and discredited. The
army high command was demoralized; relations between officers and troops took
a sharp turn for the worse, discipline seemed on the verge of complete breakdown
and there were mass desertions. The army leaders turned against Kerensky, accus*
ing him of betraying Kornilov, and General Alexeev, Kornilov’s successor, resigned,
saying that he could no longer take responsibility for an army in which discipline
had collapsed and ‘our officers are made martyrs.’ It also emerged that the Kadets
had been secretly encouraging Kornilov. The Soviets turned against Kerensky
because they suspected that he had been plotting their downfall, and the left was
strengthened because everything seemed to bear out what they had argued all
along - that the right could never be trusted to put genuine democracy first. Many
workers believed that only their prompt actions had saved the revolution.
The Bolsheviks benefited most, partly because they were seen as the chief target
of the discredited right and because they were still the only party not to have
compromised themselves by joining coalition governments with the middle class
parties. In exchange for their co-operation in dealing with the Kornilov crisis,
Kerensky ordered the release of all imprisoned Bolsheviks, including Trotsky,
who had joined the party in July. Their reviving popularity was reflected in elec
tion results around the country for city councils and Soviets. In Petrograd itself
another significant sign was the way in which the Bolsheviks came to dominate
most of the factory committees. At the Lessner works in September the Bolsheviks
won 471 votes, SRs 155, Mensheviks 23 and non-party candidates 186. At the Pipe
works where they had won only 36 per cent of the votes in the committee elections
in June, the Bolsheviks took 62 per cent in October. The First All-Russia conference
of factory committees opened on 17 October and one of the main resolutions
accepted called for a state-wide system of workers' control of production and
distribution, to be achieved by giving workers two-thirds of the places on all insti
tutions of economic regulation. This was a Bolshevik resolution, drafted by Lenin
himself.11After the Bolsheviks came to £ower it became clear that Lenin and the

factory committees meant different things by ‘workers' control’; but at this stage,
as far as ordinary workers were concerned, what mattered was that the Bolsheviks
were the only party which claimed to support any kind of workers’ control. This,
together with their promises of land for the peasants, immediate peace and gov
ernment by the Soviets, added up to an irresistible programme.
Clearly the Provisional Government was on the verge of collapse, having com
pletely failed to solve the problems facing it. Hamstrung by the need to continue
fighting the war, it had stumbled from crisis to crisis. Its handling of the economy
and the land question satisfied nobody and its attempt to go on the offensive
militarily backfired disastrously. During its last few weeks in office it consisted of
an uneasy coalition between moderate politicians from right and left who were
unable to give anybody what they really wanted. The government’s continued
failure to hold elections for the Constituent Assembly called into question its
legitimacy, and by the end of September it was viewed at best with apathy and at
worst with contempt. As it turned out, there were very few people willing to risk
their lives to save it.
4.2 The Bolshevik seizure of power -

October 1917
(a) Lenin urges immediate action
By the end of September 1917 there had been a polarization of political forces
which left Kerensky and his dwindling band of supporters in a kind of void at the
centre. Election results for Soviets and city councils demonstrated both the pol
itical polarization and the rapidly growing popularity of the Bolsheviks. In the elec
tions for the Moscow city Duma on 24 September the Bolsheviks took 51 per cent
of the vote as against only 11 per cent in June; the SR vote collapsed from 56 per
cent to 14 per cent and the Menshevik vote from 12 per cent to only 4 per cent. On
the other hand the Kadets, now seen as the main party to represent middle class
interests, increased their vote from 17 per cent to 31 per cent. The Bolsheviks had
already won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets; on 25 September,
Trotsky, now established as a Bolshevik leader, was elected chairman of the Petro
grad Soviet and four out of seven seats on the executive were filled by Bolsheviks.
Lenin was still in Finland but he kept up a constant barrage of letters to the
Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, first of all urging them to take power
in the name of the Soviets and form a coalition socialist government along with
the Mensheviks and SRs. Now that the Bolsheviks had majorities in so many
elected bodies, that would make the transference of power to a socialist govern
ment with a Bolshevik majority perfectly legal. The Bolsheviks would not resort
to violence provided the Mensheviks and SRs broke away from their association
with the Kadets, so that the socialist government would be totally responsible to
the Soviet. However, this golden opportunity was not taken - at a time when the
vast majority of soldiers, workers and peasants would surely have supported the
assumption of power by a socialist coalition government, incredibly the Menshevik
and SR leaders still preferred to cling to Kerensky and the so-called bourgeois
stage of government. So Lenin quickly changed his plan of campaign. By the middle
of September he was urging the Central Committee to seize power immediately,
either in Petrograd or Moscow. ‘The Bolsheviks, having obtained a majority in
the Soviets of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Deputies of both capitals, can and must
take state power into their own hands,’ he wrote; ‘history will not forgive us if we
do not assume power now.’ But most of the members, especially Kamenev and
Zinoviev, felt that it was too early to attempt this, since in the country as a whole
the Bolsheviks were still in a minority in most of the Soviets.
Lenin was becoming increasingly frustrated by their lack of action: although
warrants had been issued for his arrest, he slipped back into Petrograd and on
10 October attended a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee. He argued
passionately in favour of armed insurrection and persuaded them to pass, by
a vote of 10 to 2, a resolution committing the Central Committee to begin plan
ning an insurrection. At a further meeting on 16 October the vote was again in
favour of insurrection, this time by 19 to 2, but very little progress had been made
with the planning. Although the party had adopted the principle of insurrection,
there was still a strong feeling at this point that there would not be much support
outside the big cities for a purely Bolshevik uprising. The majority view was to
wait until the Second All Russia Congress of Soviets met on 20 October before
a final decision was taken; if power was taken then, it would be in the name of
the Soviets. But Lenin continued to argue that it was vital to seize power before the
Congress met in case Kerensky took steps to prevent its meeting. Probably his real
reason was so that Bolshevik control in the name of the Soviet could be presented
as an accomplished fact. If power was transferred by a vote of the Congress, it
would almost certainly be to a coalition of all the socialist parties. Two days later
Kamenev and Zinoviev published an árdele in a left-wing newspaper, Novaia
zhizn (New Life), explaining that they could not accept the idea of an uprising so
soon. They advocated waiting until the Petrograd Soviet was ready to declare itself
the new government, and expressed doubts as to whether the Bolsheviks could
hold on to power alone, even if their armed coup succeeded. ThisN.infuriated
Lenin: it not only showed that the Bolshevik leadership was divided, worse still it
let out the secret that they were planning an armed insurrection.
This new crisis for the Bolsheviks served to precipitate events in their favour.
The non-Bolshevik leaders postponed the opening of the All-Russia Congress of
Soviets until 25 October to give their supporters time to get to Petrograd; but in
fact it gave the Bolsheviks time to organize their coup. Kerensky took no action to
restrain them and was reportedly hoping they would make a move so that he
could crush them once and for all.
(b) The cou p is launched

Lenin was determined to force the pace and found that Trotsky was willing to
give him every support, even though the two men had not been on good terms
for twelve years. Although it was Lenin who was the driving force behind the
launching of the coup, it was Trotsky who planned and organized the details.
They decided to act through the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd
Soviet, a body formed on 12 October to organize the defence of Petrograd in case

the Provisional Government decided to abandon the city to the Germans. Activists
from the Bolshevik Military Organization went to talk to army units in and around
Petrograd to explain the situation. On 21 October Trotsky himself addressed
a large gathering of representatives of the Petrograd garrison at the Smolny Insti
tute, and persuaded them to adopt a resolution supporting the Soviet against the
forces of counter-revolution, by which he meant the Provisional Government
(see Document E). On 23 October thousands of rifles were distributed to the
Bolshevik Red Guards.
At this point Kerensky decided to take action to secure control of the capital.
Troops were brought in to defend strategic points around the city; telephone
lines to the Smolny Institute, the Bolshevik and Soviet headquarters, were cut and
the Bolshevik press closed down. The Military Revolutionary Committee responded
immediately, Kerensky's action enabling them to claim that they were defending
democracy against the counter-revolution (see Document F). During the night of
24-25 October, Soviet forces consisting mainly of Red Guards and workers’ militia,
supported by some of the garrison troops, took control of the telephone exchange,
post offices, railway stations, banks and the two bridges over the river Neva.
There was hardly any resistance - the small numbers of government troops
guarding these places were persuaded to disobey orders and hand over their
arms (see Document G). Kerensky had underestimated the strength of support
for the Bolsheviks and overestimated the reliability of the garrison, which, its
commanders had assured him, were very much against a Bolshevik coup. In fact
the vast majority of the garrison troops stayed neutral, unwilling to defend a
government which had just reintroduced the death penalty for them. When
Kerensky appealed for assistance to the military commanders at Mogilev, none
was forthcoming. The members of the Provisional Government waited in vain in
the Winter Palace for help to arrive.
While the action was taking place, Lenin came out of hiding and arrived at
the Smolny Institute. At 10 am on 25 October he released a declaration to the press:
‘The Provisional Government has been deposed. Government authority has passed
into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’
Deputies, the Military-Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of
the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.' The Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets
was due to begin in Petrograd later that same day, 25 October. Lenin planned to
stage a sensational opening to the Congress, announcing the overthrow of the
government and the arrest of the ministers. However, the Winter Palace was
the only important building not yet under Soviet control. Here government
troops put up more of a fight, and it wasn’t until the late evening of 25 October
that they eventually withdrew, after the cruiser Aurora, which was moored
across the river Neva from the Palace, had fired a few shots, causing some slight
damage. It was not exactly the dramatic and heroic event portrayed in Eisen-
stein's famous film October, made in 1927, but it was enough to achieve what
the Bolsheviks wanted - the arrest of the Provisional Government. Only Kerensky
escaped - he slipped out through a side entrance and drove off towards Pskov
in a car belonging to the American embassy, flying the American flag.
The delay in capturing the Winter Palace spoiled Lenin’s plan for a dramatic
opening of the Congress of Soviets. The start was delayed for two hours and
eventually they had to go ahead before the Palace had been taken. It was just
after 3 am on the morning of 26 October that Kamenev was able to announce
that the Palace had been occupied and that the ministers were under arrest In
the meantime some fierce arguments had taken place in the Congress. Of the
670 delegates, 300 were Bolsheviks, 193 SRs and 82 Mensheviks. A large majority of
the delegates was in favour of forming a coalition government of all the socialist
parties in the Soviet, and a leading Menshevik, Martov, made a proposal to this
effect. However, just when it seemed that the proposal was about to be adopted,
a large group of right-wing Mensheviks and SRs began to object. They protested
that the coup had been a conspiracy organized and carried out by the Bolshe
viks, in the name of the Soviets but behind the backs of all the other parties. If
the Provisional Government was arrested, they argued, it would provoke civil
war, and they demanded immediate talks with the government ministers. About
70 of them walked out of the hall in protest, which turned out to be a great mis
take. Trotsky dismissed their arguments contemptuously: ‘What has taken place
is an insurrection, not a conspiracy,’ he retorted; ‘an insurrection of the popular
masses was victorious and needs no justification. And now we are told: renounce
your victory, make concessions, compromise. No, a compromise is no good here.
To all those who have left and those who make proposals like these we must say
“You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out.
Go where you belong from now on - into the dustbin of history".’ At this, Martov
and a group of his supporters also walked out of the conference.
When the Congress reconvened in the evening the Bolsheviks called for the
transfer of power to the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ Soviets throughout the
country. Many of the non-Bolsheviks still expected that a standing committee
elected by the Congress and including members from all the socialist parties
would take over the central government. But all the walk-outs had played into
the Bolsheviks' hands, and since they could count on the votes of the left SRs, they
now had a comfortable majority in the Congress. It was announced that a new
Council of People’s Commissars had been formed consisting solely of Bolsheviks
and with Lenin as its chairman. This was to be the new government of Russia -
until the elections for the Constituent Assembly.
4.3 Cou p or mass insurrection?

(a) The Soviet view
The official Soviet interpretation of events12 was that the Bolshevik takeover was
the result of pressure from a mass movement workers, peasants and most of the
soldiers and sailors - in fact a majority of the population - were attracted by
the revolutionary policies of the Bolsheviks, hence the Bolshevik majorities in the
Petrograd and Moscow Soviets and city councils, and in the factory committees.
These policies included peace, land for the peasants, worker control, government
by the Soviets and self-determination for the different nationalities. The party bene
fited from its complete unity, its strict discipline and its centralization. Lenin was
a charismatic leader who inspired his party and the people; a brilliant propaganda

campaign succeeded in converting the masses. Between February and October
1917 party membership rose from only 24,000 to around 350,000. When they were
sure that the best moment had arrived, Lenin, together with Trotsky, planned and
organized the seizure of power. The Bolsheviks were successful precisely because
they had the support of a majority of the population. In only 16 out of 97 major
centres did they have to use force in order to assert their authority. It was important
for the Bolsheviks, or Communists, as they later called themselves, to emphasize
the popular nature of the revolution because that gave the regime its legitimacy.
(b) The liberal view

Earlier Western historians never accepted the Soviet view, refusing to acknow
ledge that there was any significant popular support for the Bolsheviks. They
were simply a minority group of professional revolutionaries whose efficient
organization and ruthlessness enabled them make use of the chaos in Russia
which they themselves had done so much to create. According to Adam Ulam,
‘the Bolsheviks did not seize power in this year of revolutions. They picked it up.
First autocracy, then democracy capitulated to the forces of anarchy. Any group
of determined men could have done what the Bolsheviks did in Petrograd in
October 1917: seize the few key points of the city and proclaim themselves the
government.’13 Other liberal historians claimed that whatever support the
Bolsheviks did have came from the most ignorant levels of the population.
These people were totally without political experience or understanding of what
was happening; ‘there was no such thing as mass political consciousness in
Russia in 1917.’14 They were easily taken in when the Bolsheviks offered them
what they wanted, but in reality the party had never been genuinely democratic.
This was proved beyond doubt by the way in which the Bolsheviks dealt with all
opposition after they came to power, most notably when they disbanded the
Constituent Assembly and introduced a dictatorship backed by terror.
Although revisionist research (see section 4.3(d)) has all but destroyed the
traditional liberal interpretation, Richard Pipes has continued to pursue his own
‘neo-liberal' or conservative interpretation. He almost ignores the role of the
masses, and attributes the October revolution almost entirely to Lenin’s over
whelming desire for power. In The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 (1990), the first
volume of his massive history of the revolutionary period, Pipes devotes 120
pages to the ‘Bolshevik Bid for Power and the October Coup’. He makes scarcely
any mention of the grievances and social concerns of the people or their con
tribution to the events leading up to the coup, except to deny their significance.
He insists that the events of October were a classic coup d ’état - the seizure of
power by a small minority, carried out in such a way as to give the impression of
a mass operation, but in reality without any participation by the masses. The
demonstrations were not in the least spontaneous, and were actually organized
by the Bolsheviks. Similarly, during the July Days the Bolsheviks brought to the
Tauride Palace a large contingent of Putilov workers, and although the scene
might have appeared to be spontaneous, it was closely organized by Bolshevik
agents interspersed with the crowd. In the conclusion to his second volume,
Russia under the Bolshevik Regime 1919-1924 (1994), Pipes continues the same
theme: ‘Lenin rode to power on the anarchy which he did so much to promote.
He promised every discontented group what it wanted... Lenin and Trotsky
concealed their bid for one-party dictatorship with slogans calling for the trans
fer of power to the soviets and the Constituent Assembly, and they formalized it
by a fraudulently convened Congress of Soviets.' He claims that most industrial
workers and peasants had no interest in politics and that even if they had, ‘indus
trial labor in Russia was numerically too insignificant to play a major role in
revolution; they represented a mere 2 per cent of the population.’ He points out
that during the actual coup, the masses in Petrograd acted as spectators, ignoring
Bolshevik appeals to storm the Winter Palace. Pipes is critical of revisionist pro
fessors and students, especially in the USA, who, he thinks, have spent too much
time combing historical sources in the hope of finding evidence of worker radic
alism. ‘The results are weighty tomes, filled with mostly meaningless events and
statistics, which prove that while history is always interesting, history books can
be both vacuous and dull.'15
(c) The libertarian view

The libertarian view challenges both the Soviet and liberal interpretations of
the Bolshevik success in October. Libertarians believe that the October revolution
was the result of a popular uprising which had very little to do with the Bolsheviks.
The masses were not responding to Bolshevik pressure but to their own aspir
ations and motivations - the peasants wanted land, industrial workers wanted
better conditions, better treatment and the right to control their own lives;
they had no need of the Bolsheviks to tell them these things. During the summer of
1917 their attitudes, particularly those of the industrial workers, became more
sophisticated. The numbers of factory committees increased; according to
Alexander Berkman ‘the shop and factory committees were the pioneers in
labour control of industry, with the prospect of themselves, in the near future,
managing the industries entire.'16 The peasants too had perfectly clear aims -
a network of freely organized communes in which they owned all the land. The
masses in fact were way ahead of the political parties most of the time and the
only role of the Bolshevik leaders was to try and restrain them.
The tragedy was that the Bolsheviks muscled in on the popular revolution; they
pretended that their aims were the same as those of the masses; they invented
slogans which matched those of the masses; but in reality they distrusted the
masses, especially the peasantry, and their aims were totally different. They had
no intention of allowing factory committees to control actual production and
they did not believe in genuine democracy and freedom. The masses had been
strong enough to overthrow the autocracy in February, but in October, just as
they were about to destroy the existing state and take power themselves, it was
wrenched from their hands by the Bolsheviks.
(d) Revisionist views

Most revisionist historians tended to. concentrate their researches on what was
happening among ordinary people. In many ways their approach and some of
110 Mastering Twentieth-Century rfu^sian History

their conclusions came close to those of the libertarians, though they drew on
a much wider spectrum of evidence. Their conclusions were wide-ranging: peasants
were not all primitive, illiterate animals - they were interested in events, in news
papers, in education and in a better future; and they were militant - throughout
the summer of 1917 they were taking direct action on their own initiatives, not
those of the Bolsheviks. Industrial workers too showed that their radical ideas
were their own, not those of Bolshevik agitators; nor were they naive or utopian -
in fact their behaviour ‘suggests a working class which was both highly rational in
its responses to the political and economic pressures of 1917 and extremely patient
as well.’17 Steve Smith showed that there was a growing political awareness
among industrial workers in Petrograd, in the spring of 1917. They were involved
in trade unions and Soviets; but increasingly they were active in factory commit
tees. The aim of these committees, elected on the shop-floor, was to maintain
production, in the face of attempts by employers to close the factories down;
this, so the employers hoped, would deprive the workers of their income and
cool their revolutionary ardour. The committees acted in a highly responsible
way: they maintained discipline, organized guards to defend the factories at
night, ordered raw materials, and made sure the management was not attempting
to sabotage production. They were the very opposite of revolutionary anarchists,
and were not trying to turn the factories into worker-communes. They were deter
mined to keep the factories running throughout the economic crisis, and they
often demanded that the government should help by nationalizing the plants.18
It was a similar story in Kronstadt, the island naval base about twenty miles off
Petrograd. Kronstadt was in many ways a special case: it was a fortress and a town
as well as a naval base; in 1917 it had a civilian population of 50,000, along with
20,000 soldiers and 12,000 sailors. The tensions there arose from brutal discipline,
inadequate supplies of food and clothes and general exhaustion. Within a very
short time of the February revolution, the Kronstadt Soviet of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies had established itself as the central and sole authority. It
encouraged a return to work and normality after the disturbances, abolished the
death penalty and allowed soldiers and sailors to choose their own officers. Other
decrees introduced minimum wages and an eight-hour working day, and provided
for democratic elections. By May 1917 Kronstadt had virtually declared itself an
independent republic. The Bolsheviks emerged as the largest group in the
Kronstadt Soviet; it was their resolution, condemning ‘this pernicious war’, and in
particular the Kerensky offensive, which in June was accepted by a huge majority,
thus preparing the way for the July Days.19 Clearly the role of the Bolsheviks was
important, even though they were certainly not the unified and strictly disciplined
party of the traditional Soviet view. Their great achievement in the summer of 1917
was to align themselves with the policies of the people throughout the country, to
harness the support of the people, and then to judge the right time to use that
support Though relatively few in number, the Bolshevik members of the factory
committees and Soviets were able to influence the rest, in the same way that the
Menshevik members of trade unions were able to spread their ideas.
Richard Pipes’s criticisms of the revisionists have not discouraged other
historians from continuing to trawl the archives, especially the newly opened
ones, for evidence about the experiences of ordinary people all over Russia, not
Failure o f th e Provisional G o v e rn m e n t and th e Bolshevik seizure o f p o w e r

just in Petrograd and Moscow. Christopher Read in his book From Tsar to Soviets
(1996) examines what was happening in the villages, in the provinces, and in the
army and navy during these revolutionary years. He deliberately subtitles the
book The Russian People and their Revolution, 1917-1921, and he shows how
peasants, workers, soldiers and sailors had serious economic and social griev
ances - they wanted to take control over their own lives, and by the autumn of
1917 they were convinced that the only way to achieve this was through
a government of the Soviets. Read points out that the emergence of the network
of Soviets all over Russia - 900 of them by October 1917 - was one of the great,
original features of the revolution. For many workers, the trade unions and the
factory committees ‘became the engine-room of worker organization and of
integration into political parties, which themselves showed enormous growth in
1917.’ However, for most workers, the main motivation was what was happen
ing to them in their immediate circumstances, where they lived and worked.
Read looks at the massive Putilov factories in Petrograd, which by the summer
of 1917 employed 31,000 workers producing mainly armaments. He shows that
internal stresses in the factory coincided with outbursts of revolutionary activity
in the city. In February there were serious strikes over wages, working con
ditions and heavy-handedness by foremen and overseers, and on 22 February
the management closed the works. ‘It is just possible,' Read argues, ‘that the
February revolution might not have taken place, at least in the way it did, were it
not for the struggle going on inside the Putilov factory.' Similarly the violence of
the July Days coincided with the government's rejection of a new wage and
bonus scheme which had just been worked out, and 30,000 workers came out
onto the streets. ‘Leaders in the factory, including Bolsheviks, were still doing
their utmost to stop the demonstrations, but to no effect The workers' frustra
tion was too intense and whatever influence the political parties had on them
completely broke down.' Shortly before the October coup it had been
announced that a third of the Putilov workforce were to be made redundant,
a move which was justified by the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya. This bètrayal by
their own representatives - right-wing Mensheviks and SRs - was a stunning
blow for the workers, reducing them to something close to resignation and
apathy. But although they did not come out onto the streets to demonstrate in
the vast numbers of February and July, they were sympathetic towards the
Bolsheviks, as the election results show. Similar situations were occurring in
other parts of Russia - among the miners of Ukraine and the textile workers of
Ivanovo for example; workers, motivated by workplace tensions, were ‘moving
towards their own, local October revolution through the logic of events rather
than as a result of organization and propaganda.'
On the question of the role of the peasants, Read believes that the experiences
of 1917 ‘were a series of self-generating mini-revolutions.’ Dramatic events like
land seizures and cases of violence against landlords and officials were probably
not as widespread as some writers have suggested, although they did take place.
The first step was to organize peasant committees at district or volost level; these
were an extension of the village commune, and although they rarely called them
selves Soviets, they functioned in the same way as the urban Soviets. They were
democratically elected and took the lead in trying to bring unsown land into

cultivation, and in pressurizing landlords to reduce rents by withdrawing labour.
Although there was no general violent uprising of peasants, there were some
serious outbreaks. In September 1917, for example, after a landowner in Kozlov
(Tambov province) had killed two peasants suspected of stealing his property,
the local peasants launched a general attack on 57 landowners in the region.
The authorities in Tambov sent troops to restore order, but it was only when
reinforcements arrived from Moscow that the situation was brought under
control, with the arrest of 1500 peasants. Yet although such dramatic incidents
were fairly rare, over the country as a whole there was a massive change in the
relations between landowners and peasants. ‘Where peasants had been cowed
into submission for decades... they were quick to realize that the power of the
major proprietors to defend their wealth and privilege was diminishing by the
week.’ The weakness of the government made it possible for the peasants to fulfil
their most cherished ambition - the acquisition of the land by those who worked
it. ‘The rural revolution of 1917 was a formidable component of the many events
that erupted in that tumultuous year.’
As for the military, many of their grievances were soon addressed, as we have
seen; but when Kornilov became Commander-in-Chief, the death penalty was
brought back. Read argues that the Kornilov Affair ‘had an electric effect’ on the
army and navy. Reports soon began to come in from all fronts of worsening
relations between officers and men, of ‘waves of Bolshevism’ and of calls for the
handing over of power to the Soviets. The more the officers tried to tighten
discipline, the more open the resistance became. There were widespread reports
of refusal to obey orders, demands for peace and mass fraternization with enemy
troops. This was the growing opposition to the Provisional Government that the
Bolsheviks were able to harness. Read's conclusion is that ‘the revolution was
constantly driven forward by the often spontaneous impulse given to it from the
grass roots.’ Events at the centre in Petrograd obviously had a great impact in
both February and October, but ‘they should be seen against the background of
grass roots and peripheral events... it was only the profoundly revolutionary
situation that made the October takeover possible. Coup de grace it certainly was
but it was too deeply linked with the broader situation to be considered a coup
d'état in the true sense of the word.'20
Robert Service goes along with the notion of a combination of events at the
centre of politics and events taking place among the masses - he calls it ‘a
process of dynamic interaction.’ He stresses the contribution of Lenin himself;
there can be no doubt that Lenin wanted power and used the already potentially
revolutionary situation brilliantly. He cleverly manipulated public opinion and
adopted slogans which he knew would appeal to the masses - slogans like ‘All
Power to the Soviets’ and ‘Land, Peace and Bread'. These fitted in well with work
ers’ and soldiers’ ideas of democracy based on the network of Soviets, in which
local Soviets would govern on a decentralized basis. At the same time Lenin kept
quiet about parts of the Bolshevik programme which might lose him support
among the masses; as Service puts it in his most recent book about Lenin, ‘he
was keeping his political cards close to his chest. He was a party boss, and wanted
Bolshevism to be attractive to those workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals
who had not yet supported it. And so terms such as dictatorship, terror, civil
war and revolutionary war were quietly shelved... his every pronouncement
was directed towards encouraging the “masses" to exercise initiative. His wish
was for the Bolsheviks to appear as a party that would facilitate the making of
Revolution by and for the people.'21 And indeed this seems to be exactly what
happened. The aims and concerns of the great mass of ordinary people coincided
with the carefully chosen slogans of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks did have popu
lar backing, even though it was fairly passive, for their October coup, because the
popular movement thought it was going to get government by the Soviets. In
reality therefore, the coincidence of aims between the party and the people was
very shortlived. Although some of the hopes of the masses were achieved, it
wasn’t long before disappointment with the way the new regime was developing
was to lead to civil war.
In the end the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks turned out to be remark
ably straightforward - the Provisional government could find no forces of any
significance who were prepared to fight for it, and there was hardly any real
resistance. It was ‘like picking up a feather' as Lenin put it later. But no matter
how favourable the circumstances were, it still needed that small group of
people with the nerve and the resolve to use the situation. That was the con
tribution of Lenin and Trotsky - they judged to perfection the point of max
imum unpopularity of the Provisional Government and then they actually
‘made' the revolution happen. It would not have been possible without the
popular movement - it was the popular movement which determined that
there would be so little resistance to the Bolsheviks. But equally, it would not
have been possible without Lenin and Trotsky. As Trotsky himself put it: ‘If
neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no
October Revolution; the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have
prevented it from occurring - of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had
not been in Petersburg I doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the
resistance of the Bolshevik leaders.'22
Documents
Problems of the Provisional Government
(A) The Order No. I of the Petrograd Soviet which appeared in Izvestiya on
2 March 1917.
To the garrison of the Petrograd Military District, to all soldiers of the guard,
army, artillery and fleet for immediate and exact execution, and to all the
workers of Petrograd for their information. The Soviet of Workers' and
Soldiers’ Deputies has decreed:
Committees are to be elected immediately in all companies, battalions,

regiments, batteries, squadrons... and in all naval vessels, from the elected
representatives of the lower ranks of the above-mentioned units...
1 14 Mastering Twentieth-Century Âuçsian History

The orders of the military commission of the State Duma shall be executed
only in such cases as they do not conflict with the orders and resolutions of
the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers' Deputies.
All types of arms, such as rifles, machine-guns, armoured automobiles and
others, must be kept at the disposal of company and battalion committees,
and under their control, and must in no case be turned over to officers, even
upon demand.
When off duty, in their political, civil and private lives, soldiers should enjoy
fully and completely the same rights as all citizens. In particular, standing at
attention and compulsory saluting when off duty are abolished.
The addressing of officers with the tides ‘Your Excellency’, ‘Your Honour’,
and the like, is abolished, and these tides are replaced by the address of
‘Mr General’, Mr Colonel’, and so forth. Rudeness towards soldiers of any rank
is prohibited...
Source: G. Vernadsky and others, A Source Book of Russian History, vol. 3, p. 882.
(B) General Brusilov’s visit to a division which had just thrown out its officers and
was threatening to go home - June 1917.
When I arrived at their camp I demanded to speak to a delegation of the

soldiers: it would have been dangerous to appear before the whole crowd.
When these arrived I asked them which party they belonged to, and they
replied that before they had been Socialist Revolutionaries, but that now they
supported the Bolsheviks. ‘What do you want?’ I asked them. ‘Land and Free
dom,’ they all cried. ‘And what else?' The answer was simple: ‘Nothing else!’
When I asked them what they wanted now, they said that they did not want to
fight any more and pleaded to be allowed to go home in order to share out the
land their fellow villagers had taken from the squires and live in freedom. And
when I asked them: ‘What will happen to Mother Russia if no one wants to
defend it, and everyone like you only thinks of themselves?’ they replied that it
was not their job to think about what should become of the state, and that
they had firmly decided to go home.
Source: quoted in Figes, p. 416.
(C) After his dismissal by Kerensky, General Kornilov sent the following message
to all commanders and to the Russian people, 27 August 1917.
The telegram of the Prime Minister [stating that Kornilov had demanded
supreme power for himself] is an out-and-out lie.
Russian people: our great homeland is dying! The moment of death is near!
Forced to speak out publicly, I, General Kornilov, declare that the Provisional
{continued)
Government, under pressure from the Bolshevik majority in the Soviet, acts in
full accord with the plans of the German General Staff and, concurrently with
the imminent landings of enemy forces on the coast of Riga, destroys the army
and convulses the country from within...
I, General Kornilov, the son of a Cossack peasant, declare to each and all
that I personally desire nothing except to save Great Russia. I swear to lead
people to victory over the enemy to the Constituent Assembly, where it will
decide its own destiny and choose its new political system.
Source: quoted in Pipes, pp. 459-60.
Lenin and the October Revolution

(D) Report on the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets, June 1917, by an English
observer, M. Philips Price.
There now arose from an obscure corner of the room a thick-set little man
with a round bald head and small Tartar eyes. He was leading a small group
of delegates who had set themselves down on the extreme left and at the
back of the hall. Nobody seemed to pay much attention to the comer where
they sat... But as soon as this short thick-set little man rose and strode with
firm step, and even firmer look upon his countenance, up the gangway,
a hush came upon the whole assembly. For it was Lenin, the leader of that
small Bolshevik minority at this Congress. No uncertain words came from his
lips. Straight to the point he went from the first moment of his speech and
pursued his opponents with merciless logic. ‘Where are we?’ he began,
stretching out his short arms and looking questioningly at his audience.
‘What is this Council of Workers' and Soldiers’ Delegates? Is there anything
like it anywhere else in the world? No, of course not, because nothing so
absurd as this exists in any country today except in Russia. Then let us have
either one of two things: either a bourgeois government with its plans of
so-called social reforms on paper, or let us have that government which you
[pointing to Tsereteli - a Menshevik leader] seem to long for, but which you
apparently have not the courage to bring into existence, a government of the
proletariat... '
Source: M. Philips Price, My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution, p. 44.
(E) Resolution by representatives of the Petrograd garrison at the Smolny Institute

on 21 October 1917.
Endorsing all political decisions of the Petrograd Soviet, the garrison declares:
the time for words has passed. The country is on the verge of ruin. The army
demands peace, the peasants demand land, and the workers demand bread
and work. The Coalition Government is against the people. It became the tool
116 Mastering Twentieth-Century rfuîan History

of the enemies of the people. The All-Russia Congress of Soviets must take the
power into its own hands in order to give to the people peace, land and bread.
Only thus can the safety of the revolution and of the people be ensured. The
Petrograd garrison solemnly pledges itself to put at the disposal of the All
Russian Congress all its forces, to the last man, to fight for these demands.
Rely on u s... we are at our posts, ready to conquer or die.
Source: Quoted in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, pp. 304-5.
(F) Trotsky describes the beginning of the October coup.
An attempt to suppress the papers, a resolution to prosecute the Military

Revolutionary Committee, an order removing commissars, the cutting-off of
Smolny’s telephones - these pinpricks were just sufficient to convict the
government of preparing a counter-revolutionary coup d'état. Although an
insurrection can win only on the offensive, it develops better the more it looks
like self-defence. A piece of official sealing wax on the door of the Bolshevik
editorial rooms - as a military measure that is not much. But what a superb
signal for battle! Telephonograms to all districts and units of the garrison
announced the event: ‘The enemy of the people took the offensive during the
night. The Military Revolutionary Committee is leading the resistance to the
assault of the conspirators.’ The conspirators - these were the institutions of
the official government.
The Aurora in the Neva meant not only an excellent fighting unit in the ser
vice of the insurrection, but a radio station ready for use. Invaluable advan
tage! The Aurora's radio broadcast that the counter-revolution had taken the
offensive, and the garrisons guarding the approaches to Petrograd were
ordered by radio to hold up the counter-revolutionary echelons. It was a ques
tion of taking full possession of Petrograd in the next twenty-four hours.
Source: Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, pp. 1055-7.
(G) A report from General Polkovnikov, the Military Commander in Petrograd, to

army headquarters, 25 October 1917.
The situation in Petrograd is menacing. There are no street disorders, but

a systematic seizure of government buildings and railway stations is going
on. None of my orders is obeyed. The cadets surrender their posts almost
without resistance, and the Cossacks, who were repeatedly ordered to come
out refused to do so. I must report, conscious of my responsibility to the
country, that the Provisional Government is in danger. There is no guaranty
that the insurrectionists will not next attempt to arrest the Provisional
Government.
Source: quoted in R.W. Clark, Lenin, The Man behind the Mask, pp. 270-1.
Notes
1. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919, pp. 419-31.
2. Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Bolshevism: the Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July
1917 Uprising, pp. 174-6.
3. Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, p. 284.
4. See L.C. Heenan, Russian Democracy’s Fateful Blunder: The Summer Offensive o f 1917,
for a development of this theory.
5. Allan Wildman, 'The Breakdown of the Imperial Army in 1917’, in Acton, Chemiaev and
Rosenberg (editors), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914-1921, pp. 70-1.
See also his great two-volume, massively detailed work The End o f the Russian Imperial
Army, vol. 2, pp. 73-111.
6. Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914-1917, p. 284. See pp. 282-301 for a detailed an
alysis of the economic chaos.
7. R. Abraham, Alexander Kerensky: The First Love o f the Revolution is a good biography.
8. See George Katkov, The Kornilov Affair: Kerensky and the Break-up of the Russian Army
for a detailed account.
9. Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets, p. 56.
10. Pipes, pp. 451-64.
11. Steve Smith, ‘Factory Committees’, in Acton, Chemiaev and Rosenberg (editors), Critical
Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914-1921, pp. 352-3. See also his Red Petrograd:
Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918, for a detailed analysis of Petrograd factory com
mittees and trade unions. Also useful is D. Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet
Seizure of Power.
12. Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution, and Acton, Chemiaev and Rosenberg
(editors), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution are extremely helpful for a survey
of the different interpretations.
13. Adam Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, p. 409.
14. Roger Pethybridge, The Spread o f the Russian Revolution. Essays on 1917, p. 196.
15. Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899-1919, pp. 385,428; Russia under the Bolshevik Regime
1919-1924, pp. 494,498.
16. Alexander Berkman, The Russian Tragedy, p. 58.
17. Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution, p. 359.
18. Steve Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918, pp. 65-8,80-98,139-67.
19. Israel Getzler, Kronstadt 1917-1921, pp. 29-40, 66,81,109-10. N
20. Read, pp. 5, 65, 68-71,102-3,117-18,140-2.
21. Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, p . 315.
22. Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, p. 54.

HS 5 Lenin and the Bolsheviks
in power, 19 17 -2 4
Summary of events
Although the Bolsheviks took control easily enough in Petrograd, in the name of
the Soviets, it was more difficult in Moscow; there was fierce house-to-house
fighting and they had to use artillery fire to capture the Kremlin. Other cities soon
came under Bolshevik control, but in the rural areas they had only limited influ
ence, and most of the non-Russian provinces looked on the Bolshevik takeover
as a chance to assert their independence. In fact very few people, including some
of the Bolshevik leaders themselves, expected the new government to last very
long. It faced enormous problems, and the new ministers, or 'commissars’ as
they called themselves, had spent so much time thinking about revolution that
they had no clearly thought out plans ready.
Early Bolshevik reforms

Whether or not they could stay in power depended very much on whether they
could deliver what they had been promising - peace, land and bread - and
whether they could put the economy right. There could hardly have been a more
testing and desperate time for a new government to take over. They began right
away - during an all-night session of the Congress of Soviets on 26-27 October
Lenin announced their first decrees:
• Negotiations for peace were to begin immediately with Germany and her allies
and there was to be no more secret diplomacy.
• Land owned by landlords and the church was to be confiscated without
compensation and handed over to village Soviets for the time being - final
arrangements would be made by the Constituent Assembly, but it was under
stood that the land would be redistributed among the peasants. Official
Bolshevik policy was for the land to be nationalized (taken over by the state),
so this was a concession to win the support of the peasants.
• A third decree set up the new government of 15 commissars (ministers), known
as the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), with Lenin as chairman,
Trotsky as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and Stalin as Chairman for Nation
ality Affairs.
The Left Socialist Revolutionaries join the government

But there were tensions between the Bolsheviks and the other socialist groups:
Lenin had invited the Left SRs to join the government but they refused; they
Lenin and the Bolsheviks in power 119

wanted all shades of SR and Menshevik opinion to be represented in a coalition
of all the left-wing parties; but Lenin was determined that the Bolsheviks should
exercise power alone. This problem was eventually resolved for the time being
when three Left SRs agreed to join Sovnarkom. There were also disagreements
over policy within the Bolshevik Central Committee: for example, was industry
the property of the people or the state? What was to be the role of trade unions
and factory committees now that a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was in oper
ation? Was the land to be the property of the peasants who worked it or was it
going to be nationalized?
November 1917: Constituent Assembly election

The first big milestone was the election for the Constituent Assembly on 12
November. The results were disappointing for the Bolsheviks who came second
with 175 seats out of a total of 717; the Socialist Revolutionaries led by Viktor
Chernov emerged as easily the largest single party with 370 seats.
January 1918: end of the Constituent Assembly

But Lenin had no intention of letting the SRs take power and the Constituent
Assembly was dissolved at gunpoint after only one day and one all-night sitting
(5-6 January 1918); it never met again. The justification for this was that the
Assembly must take second place to the Congress of Soviets and Sovnarkom.
January-March 1918: the struggle for peace and the Treaty of Brest-litovsk
The stream of decrees setting up the ‘new socialist order’ (including the national
ization of banks and industry) continued to flow and peace negotiations with the
Central Powers got under way at Brest-litovsk in Poland. For much of the time
the Russian delegation was led by Trotsky; a cease-fire had been agreed on 23
November, but progress was slow and German demands were harsh. There was
fierce argument in Russia about whether or not to accept the terms, but the
Russians were desperate for peace, and it was decided that the sacrifice had to be
made. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ratified on 16 March 1918, was humiliating
for Russia, depriving her of a vast area of land and 55 million people.
The drift toward Civil War

The government was becoming increasingly unpopular; peace had been secured
but the cost was high, and every one of the new decrees caused resentment in some
quarter or other. During May and June the Bolsheviks began to lose their majorities
in the big urban Soviets, but used force to keep control. The SRs and the Mensheviks
came out in open resistance and Lenin narrowly survived two assassination
attempts. With the help of their new secret police, the Cheka, the Bolsheviks turned
more and more to violence, terror and extreme measures to keep themselves in
power; in the summer of 1918 uprisings staged by SRs were ruthlessly dealt with:
there were hundreds of arrests and over a thousand people were executed.
1918-20: Civil War (Reds against Whites)

Meanwhile the anti-Bolshevik forces, who became known as the Whites, were
beginning to gather themselves together in several areas - major armies were

T LI c kem :
Figure 5.1 Bolshevik Civil War poster: ‘Kazak! Whose side are you on? Ours or theirs?'
formed in Siberia, the Caucasus and Estonia. By the summer of 1918 the country
was in the grip of a full-scale Civil War; White armies advanced on Moscow (now
the capital) from the south, the east and the north-west. Britain, France, the USA
and Japan sent troops to help the Whites, and the Reds seemed in a hopeless
position. In July the Tsar and his family were murdered to prevent them being
rescued by the Whites and used as a focus of opposition to the Bolsheviks. In real
ity, though, the Bolsheviks had all the advantages; the Red Army was successfully
Lenin and the Bolsheviks in power 12 1

reorganized by Trotsky, who was now the Commissar for War; and an effective
new policy known as War Communism was introduced. This extended state
control over the entire economy, and included requisitioning grain from the
peasants. The Bolsheviks were able to defeat the White armies one by oiie; but it
wasn’t until November 1920 that the Civil War formally ended.
1920- 21 - War between Russia and Poland ended in defeat for Russia.
1921 - Russia devastated after the Civil War

After six years of almost non-stop war, Russia, or what was left of it, was in a state
of complete chaos:
• The economy was in a state of collapse, industrial and agricultural production

had fallen alarmingly and the peasants were resentful of War Communism
and the government's grain requisitioning policy.
• During 1921 and 1922 there were constant famines and epidemics.
• In some places, open revolt broke out; the most disturbing one for the Bol
sheviks took place in March 1921 when there was a mutiny of the 15,000 soldiers
and sailors who made up the garrison of Kronstadt; they were joined by sev
eral thousand workers from Petrograd who crossed over to the island to lend
their support. These people had been the Bolsheviks’ strongest supporters in
1917, but now they denounced the government as ‘enemies of the people’.
Once again force was used to restore order; many former Bolshevik supporters
were outraged that the Red Army had fired on ‘the heroes of the revolution’, as
Trotsky had earlier described them.
1921: The New Economic Policy (NEP) brings concessions and a mixed economy
Soon after the Kronstadt rising Lenin began to change his approach to the econ
omy. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was brought in, dropping the requisi
tioning of grain, allowing private trading and handing back smalleï firms to
private ownership. There was a general move away from complete state control
of the economy towards a mixed economy in which there were elements of cap
italism and socialism. Many of the leading Bolsheviks were unhappy about this
trend, seeing it as an unacceptable departure from Marxism. However, Nikolai
Bukharin supported Lenin strongly and the new policy went ahead. Statistics
suggest that by 1924 the NEP had helped to bring about an economic revival,
though it was far from being a magic solution to all the problems of the economy.
1921- 22: Political control tightens

Although Lenin was willing to make concessions on the economy, he kept firm
political control:•
• At the same time as NEP was introduced, another resolution entitled ‘on party
unity’ tightened discipline by banning factions within the party.
• In 1922 all other political parties except the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks
were now called) were banned and hundreds of Kadets and Mensheviks were
deported from Russia.

• The government redoubled its efforts to influence people's minds through
popular culture and tried to create a new ‘Soviet man and woman’.
• At the same time Lenin was sympathetic to the non-Russian nationalities and
wanted them to have some elements of self-government. Over this question
Lenin clashed with Stalin who was a Russian nationalist and wanted the
Russians to be dominant.
• USSR comes into existence - on the last day of 1922 a new constitution was
ratified; it began to go into operation immediately and the Soviet state
became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Seemingly against all
the odds, Bolshevik power had been maintained and consolidated; all the vital
elements of a one-party dictatorship were now in place.
January 1924: Death of Lenin

By the end of 1922 when the new constitution was ratified, Lenin was a sick man;
he suffered a stroke in May 1922 and another more serious one in December.
After this he had less and less influence on the course of events and a third stroke
in March 1923 left him paralysed and unable to speak. He died on 21 January
1924. During his last months, one of his greatest disappointments was that the
revolution in Russia had still not been followed by successful proletarian revolu
tions anywhere else.
Lenin's premature death leaves many unresolved questions:

• The vital dilemma for the communist government was: should they continue
to try to bring about world revolution or concentrate on developing socialism
in one country - Russia? This problem left Soviet foreign policy full of contra
dictions - on the one hand Russian communists working with other European
communist parties in an organization known as the Communist International
were trying to provoke revolutions, while on the other hand the Russian gov
ernment was trying to get economic help from the very countries they were
trying to destabilize.
• Would NEP continue for the foreseeable future?
• Who was to be Lenin’s successor? Or would there be a collective leadership?
• Would there be a relaxation on the political front with the emergence of
a genuinely democratic socialist system?•
• Did the Bolsheviks have any real popularity or was it simply violence and
terror that kept them in power?
• Did Lenin have violent intentions from the beginning or was he pushed
into these policies by the difficult circumstances?
• Were the Bolsheviks militarized and brutalized by the civil war or were
they like that all along?
• Were they any worse than previous regimes in their use of repression and
terror?
0continued)

• Was NEP just a temporary retreat from strict Marxism or, as Bukharin
believed, a policy that ‘must be followed seriously and for a long time'?
• How important was Lenin's contribution to the events of 1917-23?
• Did Lenin genuinely believe in the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat' or was
he an evil genius whose main concern was his lust for personal power?
5.1 The political situation - the Constituent

Assembly
(a) Coalition or not?
The main political issue facing Lenin was that the Second All-Russia Congress of
Soviets was under the impression that the new government was a Soviet regime,
not a purely Bolshevik one. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were
hoping to join a coalition government of all the socialist parties, though they had
few illusions about Lenin's intentions. Some of the leading Bolsheviks, including
Lev Kamenev, Grigori Zinoviev and Alexei Rykov, tried to reason with Lenin that
this was the right democratic course and that the Bolsheviks could only survive
as part of a coalition. Lenin was unmoved: he had very little time for the Menshe
viks and SRs since they had compromised themselves by entering a coalition
with the Kadets, and he believed that if he allowed them a share of the power,
they would prevent him from carrying out the full Bolshevik programme.
The forces of the right too must be kept under control and at the end of October
a strict press censorship was brought back; this was ostensibly intended to close
down the right-wing and liberal press, but could also be used against any socialist
newspaper if necessary. However, the SRs had wide support among the peasants,
and the railway workers' union wanted a coalition and threatened to go on strike
unless one was formed. This could be serious - food and fuel supplies to the
capital and other cities would be held up and the already chaotic situation would
become much worse. Kamenev had discussions with Menshevik, SR and union
representatives and at one point actually agreed to a plan for a socialist coalition,
but excluding Lenin and Trotsky.
Lenin and Trotsky, supported by Stalin, soon dealt with that problem - there
was a decisive confrontation with Kamenev at a Bolshevik Central Committee
meeting early in November in which Kamenev was left in no doubt about what
was going to happen: there would be no socialist coalition and he and his sup
porters would be expelled from the party unless they agreed. After a browbeating
from Lenin, Kamenev and his four strongest supporters - Zinoviev, Rykov, Miliutin
and Nogin - resigned from the party Central Committee. It seemed as though the
Bolsheviks were fatally divided and most people thought their days in power
were numbered. But support came from the left wing of the SRs who were now
functioning more or less as a separate party from the Right SRs. The Left SRs were
happy with the Bolsheviks’ land decree which was the basic item of their pro
gramme and they were prepared to go along with Bolshevik policies in the hope
of moderating them and achieving more of their own programme. Three Left SRs
were allowed to join Sovnarkom and five others were given lesser jobs, but the
124 Mastering Twentieth-Century f<ij$sian History

Bolsheviks kept all the most important posts; according to Orlando Figes, ‘the
Left SRs were really no more than a fig-leaf used by Lenin to conceal the naked
ness of his dictatorship.’1But it was enough to mollify the trade unions, and the
threat of a railway strike was removed. As for the five moderates who had
resigned from the Central Committee, they all lacked the leadership qualities
and the ruthlessness to form a breakaway party, and by the end of November
1917 they had capitulated to Lenin’s will. The Bolshevik party was united and
surviving.
(b) Bolshevik power extended

The first few weeks brought other problems for the Bolsheviks: there was a strike
of civil servants protesting against their seizure of power; the post and telegraph
office workers did their best to be unco-operative, and the State Bank refused
to release any funds. Even teachers and pharmacists went on strike. Finally on
17 November a detachment of troops accompanied by a military band was used
to take control of the bank and forcibly remove the necessary funds. Eyewitnesses
remarked that it was more like a bank hold-up than a government taking what
it was legally entitled to. Little by little the government was able to extend its
control: some strike leaders and hostile civil service chiefs were arrested and
replaced by Bolshevik sympathisers. It was announced that in the countryside
power now rested in the hands of the local Soviets, while in industrial areas factory
committees were given the right to supervise the management, thereby making
the concept of ‘worker control’ a reality. In this way the old pre-revolutionary
administrative and control systems would be destroyed.
Sovnarkom acted as the government, taking precedence over the Executive of
the Congress of Soviets, and a whole stream of new decrees and resolutions
poured out. National self-determination was offered to the non-Russian peoples
of the Empire, and in particular Finland and Poland were promised complete
independence. Lenin hoped that this would encourage revolutions leading to
Soviet governments in these regions. The new Soviet states would then voluntarily
join Russia to form a huge multi-national Soviet state. Turning to the workers, as
well as the decree on workers' control, there was to be a maximum eight-hour
working day, free education for all children, and full civil and religious rights for
all citizens. Sovamarkom was given the authority to regulate industry, agriculture,
trade and banking, and all banks were nationalized. During December 1917 the
government took control of some of the larger factories.
Much of this was popular - it was the sort of programme designed to help the
working class that the Bolsheviks had been promising before October. One move
which had not been talked about earlier was the creation in early December of
an Extraordinary Commission to root out counter-revolution; soon to be known
as the Cheka, this organization was not subject to ordinary legal procedures. Under
its ruthless leader, Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish communist, it became a huge
organization whose function was to look after state security. Its members were
instructed to use their revolutionary consciences and take whatever action was
deemed necessary to protect the revolution. This soon degenerated into a cam
paign of mass terror. In December 1917 all this was still in the future, and not

many people at the time realized the significance of the Cheka's creation. The
attention of the country at large was focused on something else - the elections
for the Constituent Assembly which began on 12 November and were spread out
over two weeks. It was confidently expected among the opposition parties that
the election results and the meeting of the Assembly would see the end of the
Bolshevik regime.
(c) The Constituent Assembly comes and goes

Kerensky had fixed 12 November as the starting date for the elections, so the
Bolsheviks, having continually criticized the Provisional Government for post
poning them, could hardly put them off again.2 Lenin was afraid that the
Bolsheviks would lose the election; it was one thing for them to win majorities in
the Soviets and in the Congress of Soviets, where only workers and soldiers had
the vote; but when the peasahts and all the rest of the population voted, the most
likely winners were the SRs. The election was the most democratic and free that
the country had ever seen - everybody aged 20 and over, both men and women,
was allowed to vote. It proved to be the last free election until 1993. Lenin’s fears
were justified: the Bolsheviks came a poor second to the SRs. The full figures
were:
Socialist Revolutionaries 370 (16 million votes)

Bolsheviks 175 (10 million votes)
Left Socialist Revolutionaries 40
Mensheviks 16
Kadets 17
Various national groups 80
Under a Western-style democratic system the SRs would have been expected to
form a government, with their leader, Viktor Chernov, as Prime Minister. How
ever, Lenin, supported by all the leading Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, had
decided to ignore the election results and get rid of the Constituent Assembly as
soon as possible. Having made a good start, as they saw it, on setting up the
workers' state, they were not prepared to see it threatened by a Constituent
Assembly full of Right SRs with their bourgeois tendencies. Sovnarkom agreed
that the Assembly should be allowed to meet in January 1918 but that it should
be sent packing soon after its first meeting.
How could this apparently undemocratic decision be justified? To begin with,
the Bolsheviks claimed that the arrangements for the elections, which had been
made by the Provisional Government, were flawed, because in the majority of
areas the ballot papers did not distinguish between Left and Right SRs. This pre
vented peasants who were pleased with Lenin’s land decree from voting specific
ally for Left SRs, whose main support was among younger peasants who had
served in the army and navy. The argument was that if the split in the SR party
had been clearly shown on the ballot papers, the Left SRs, who were still allies
of the Bolsheviks, would have won many more than 40 seats, and the Right SRs
correspondingly fewer. Some of the SR representatives were non-Russians, and it
126 Mastering Twentieth-Century fti^ssian History

was by no means certain that they would vote with the Russian SR group. In fact
it is doubtful whether the SRs would have been able to muster an overall majority
in the Assembly. Given that the Bolsheviks held a majority in the Soviets of all the
big urban industrial areas, the SRs would have found it extremely difficult to
govern the country.
In several of his writings around this time Lenin justified the rejection of
parliamentary democracy. He argued that there were two forms of democracy:
bourgeois democrat which was exercised through a parliament elected by the
whole country, and revolutionary democracy which was exercised by the Soviets
elected by working people - the majority of the population. Soviet democracy
was a higher form of democracy than parliamentary democracy because it
abolished exploitation of the workers by the ruling class. The exploiters had
enjoyed their day - now it was time for the workers to enjoy their form of demo
cracy. The Bolsheviks had never claimed to represent the whole population -
they had seized power in the name of the working class. The dictatorship of the
proletariat meant the workers overthrowing and smashing the remnants of the
old capitalist system, which included parliaments dominated by the bourgeoisie
and their ‘hirelings’ and ‘accomplices’ (SRs and Mensheviks). Lenin also quoted
a speech made in 1903 by Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Social Democracy,
who said:
‘The success of the revolution is the supreme law. And if, for the sake of the
revolution, it should become necessary to restrict the action of one or
another democratic principle, then it would be criminal not to do so... one
must view even the principle of the universal vote as one such fundamental
principle of democracy... one can conceive of a situation where we Social
Democrats would oppose the universal vote. If in an outburst of revolu
tionary enthusiasm the people elect a very good parliament, then we
should try to prolong it; but if the elections turned out unfavourably, then
we should try to disperse the parliament - not in two years, but, if possible,
in two weeks.'3
Meanwhile supporters of the Assembly formed a Union for the Defence of the
Constituent Assembly and on 28 November held an impressive demonstration
outside the Tauride Palace. The Bolsheviks responded by banning the Kadet
party and arresting a number of its leaders. On the opening day, 5 January 1918,
the Tauride Palace was surrounded by thousands of reliable government troops
armed with machine-guns and artillery (see Document A). An unarmed demon
stration in support of the Assembly was fired on by Red Guards positioned on
rooftops, and at least ten protesters were killed. When the opening session of the
Assembly eventually got under way the SRs, as the largest party, attempted to
begin the discussions but were shouted down by the Bolshevik deputies and by
some of the soldiers who were there to ‘keep order’. They succeeded in getting
Chernov elected as chairman, but then the Bolsheviks introduced a Declaration
of the Rights of Working People, one of the clauses of which required the Assem
bly to renounce its authority to pass laws. Naturally the SRs could not accept this
and they were able to defeat it by a large majority. However, this was what the

Bolsheviks had been angling for: it enabled them to claim that the Assembly had
been hi-jacked by ‘counter-revolutionaries'. The Bolsheviks walked out of the
session and at a separate meeting chaired by Lenin it was decided that this was
the time to dissolve the Assembly. Lenin gave orders that the Red Guards should
allow the session to continue for a time and that force must not be used. At just
after 4 o'clock in the morning on 6 January the commander of the guard informed
Chernov that the guards were tired and the session must end. At 4.40 am the
deputies filed out at gun-point; when they returned next day the Tauride Palace
was locked and they were told that the Assembly had been dissolved. And that
was the end of it. Two days later the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets
opened; the Bolsheviks and Left SRs had a huge majority in this assembly which
proceeded to approve all the recent new decrees. It recognized Sovnarkom as the
legitimate government and announced that Russia was to be known as the Russian
Soviet Socialist Republic.
Surprisingly perhaps, there was no violent reaction to this unceremonious
closure of the Constituent Assembly; and yet it isn’t difficult to explain (see
Document B). Chernov and the SRs were not prepared to use force against the
Bolsheviks at this stage, arguing that they ‘must proceed by legal means alone.’
Most of the action was taking place in Petrograd and Moscow where much of the
Bolsheviks’ support was concentrated. The main SR supporters, the peasants,
were getting what they most wanted - the redistribution of the land through their
local Soviets - and they seemed not to care whether the government in distant
Petrograd was the Constituent Assembly or not. The Assembly's strongest sup
porters, the intelligentsia, had very little military strength to call on and so for the
time being there was no serious challenge to the developing Bolshevik dictator
ship. Lenin could feel pleased with progress so far, although there was no room
for complacency; two big problems remained: a peace settlement had not been
reached, and the economy was still in crisis.
5.2 Land and economic problems

(a) The Bolsheviks and the land
The Bolsheviks' second decree ordered that land should be taken from land-
owners, the church, monasteries, the state and the monarchy without com
pensation, together with livestock and farm equipment, and handed over to the
local Soviets, for redistribution among the peasants. During the following three
months, the vast majority of this land was taken and redistributed to members of
the village commune according to their needs - the larger the family, the more
land they received. Orlando Figes has carried out a detailed analysis of what
happened in Saratov province around the river Volga, some 500 miles south-east
of Moscow.4 He discovered that the Saratov peasants also took over farms
belonging to those who had separated from the communes as a result of
Stolypin's policies (see section 2.4(a)). In fact some of these so-called ‘separators'
beat them to it by voluntarily coming back into the commune in the hope of
getting a share of the spoils taken from the wealthy landowners. On the whole
12 8 Mastering T w en tieth -C e n tu ry1Russian H istory

the peasants in Saratov province did well out of the land redistribution, on
average doubling the size of their individual holdings.
Although the peasants had at last achieved their greatest wish - and with the
encouragement of the government - the redistribution of land brought fresh
problems. The big estates and the ‘separator’ farms which had been broken up
were the most efficient units in the agricultural system. Russia was now depend
ent for its food supply and its main export commodity on some 25 million small
holders working tiny plots and using the traditional, less efficient methods of the
peasant commune. It was inevitable that grain output would fall and that there
were going to be serious food shortages. These developments caused great
controversy within the Bolshevik party. The traditional Bolshevik land policy had
been to end private ownership, to bring all the land under state control and to
reorganize it into large collective farms. This would enable modem farming
methods and mechanization to be used on a large scale; although individual
peasants would not actually own a separate piece of land, overall productivity
would be much higher and the whole community would be much better off.
Many of the leading Bolsheviks thought that Lenin was completely misguided to
allow the peasants a free hand with the land redistribution; but he rightly pointed
out that there was very little the government could do in those early months to
resist almost the entire peasant population. Lenin argued that it was a temporary
tactical retreat. He believed that broadly speaking there were two classes of
peasants: the majority, like the industrial working classes, were poor; the better-
off peasants, known as kulaks, were seen by Lenin as enemies of socialism, who
would resist the setting-up of collective farms. He seems to have believed that
there was a class war in progress in the countryside which he could use to
achieve his ultimate aims. The poor peasants could be used to dispossess the
kulaks.
By February 1918 Lenin was beginning to move more towards the original
Bolshevik position. He announced that in time they hoped to organize ‘the col
lective system of agriculture as being more economic both in respect of labour
and of products, at the expense of individual holdings, in order to bring about the
transition towards a socialist economy.' In June 1918 the government set up
committees of poor peasants, known as kombedy; they were intended to stir up
the class war in the countryside in which, it was hoped, the great mass of poorer
peasants would seize kulak land to be incorporated into collective farms. But the
kombedy were a failure: they were unpopular with most types of peasants who
saw them as just another example of government interference, especially when
some of them advocated forced collectivization, and they often seemed to be in
conflict with local Soviets over exactly what their role was. The government
further discredited itself in the eyes of the peasants by banning private trade and
introducing a policy of confiscating surplus grain from peasants in order to feed
the cities and the army. This had disastrous effects: unable to market their sur
plus grain and unwilling to see it taken from them at giveaway prices, peasants
produced only enough for their own needs. Before very long the cities were
beginning to feel the pinch, and during the winter of 1918-19 droves of industrial
workers left the cities for the countryside. Early in December 1918 the kombedy
were abolished.

It wasn't long before the peasants' satisfaction with the land redistribution
turned intp resentment and resistance to government policies. The Cheka reported
over a hundred peasant uprisings in the European part of Russia between July
and November 1918. In Saratov province there were a number of violent
incidents; in one village eleven members of the local kombed were murdered by
irate villagers who went on to organize neighbouring villages in an armed cam
paign to resist the groups sent to confiscate their grain. The villagers fought them
off, describing them as ‘alien food brigades which have given power to hooligans
calling themselves members of the “rural poor''.' However, the government did
not allow this challenge to go unanswered: a detachment of Red Guards was sent
to restore order and escort the food brigade as it went about its duties.5 Lenin
blamed such problems on the kulaks who, he claimed, were trying to sabotage
attempts to develop the new socialist state. His critics in the party claimed that
this was the inevitable consequence of launching the proletarian revolution too
soon after the bourgeois revolution, before the industrial working class was large
or powerful enough to exercise its dictatorship. Kamenev and Zinoviev had
always argued that this would leave the revolution at the mercy of the peasants.
So the Bolsheviks turned to more forceful methods which only caused more
resentment (see section 5.4).
(b) Industry and finance

At the end of 1917 these areas of the economy were in serious difficulties: factory
production in 1917 was 30 per cent less than in 1913, through a combination of
transport problems, shortage of raw materials, lack of investment and continued
massive inflation. Lenin intended a gradual transition to a socialist system
through an intermediate stage in which Soviets and workers’ committees would
‘supervise' the management; it would be a sort of joint management in which the
workers' committees would learn how to do the job. Full control by the workers
would come later, though just how much later was not made clear;Nonce the
working population was free from exploitation by capitalists, the economy would
right itself. The government began in mid-November 1917 by bringing large
factories under state control; owners had to make accounts and other docu
ments available to workers' committees, and in the last resort, workers’ decisions
were to be binding on owners. But there was also pressure from below: according
to Robert Service, many workers in medium and small factories ignored the
authorities and carried out their own ‘nationalization’; often this was in order to
forestall the threatened shutdown of their factories by the owners.6 But the
expected intermediate stage of ‘supervision’ did not materialize: many managers
and owners refused to co-operate; some simply abandoned their factories while
others were thrown out by workers’ committees. These developments were
extremely popular with urban workers; in their view this was what the revolution
had been for - freedom from exploitation and the right to organize their own
lives. Hundreds of them, including many Bolshevik party members, volunteered
for work in administration and public service.
Worker control did not bring the expected benefits. Without the skills and
experience of managers and engineers, factories were thrown into chaos and in

1918 production fell catastrophically to only one-third of the 1917 figure. In this
desperate situation Lenin realized that concessions would have to be made; he
resorted to a policy of bringing managers back into the factories, and attracted
them by paying them much higher wages than ordinary workers. He defended
this apparently regressive step in a long article, Immediate Tasks of the Soviet
Government, published in April 1918. ‘The transition to socialism/ he wrote, ‘will
be impossible without the guidance of experts in the various fields of knowledge,
technology and experience..., and the specialists are, in the main, inevitably
bourgeois. Now we have to resort to the old bourgeois method and to agree to
pay a very high price for the “services” of the top bourgeois experts... Clearly this
measure is a compromise, a departure from the principles of the Paris Commune
and every proletarian power, which call for the reduction of all salaries to the
level of the wages of the average worker.’7
More ominous for the workers was Lenin’s call for ‘iron discipline’. He com
plained that at present the government was too weak - ‘very often it resembles
jelly more than iron.’ He argued that Russians were ‘bad workers' compared with
people in advanced countries; although this was the fault of the tsarist regime,
the main task for the people was: ‘learn to work.’ Astonishingly for the leader
of the proletarian revolution, he advocated adopting the theories of Frederick
W. Taylor (1856-1915), an American engineer and inventor who is regarded as
the founder of scientific management. The most controversial aspect of Taylor’s
system was his time and motion study - efficiency in factories could be greatly
improved by close observation of individual workers with a view to eliminating
wasted time and unnecessary motion. While the value and influence of Taylor's
ideas are beyond doubt, they provoked great resentment and opposition among
workers, who felt that this was the height of exploitation. ‘We must organize in
Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system,’ wrote Lenin, ‘and systemat
ically try it out and adapt it to our own ends... we must make wages correspond
to the total amount of goods turned out.’8It would not be possible to build social
ism, he argued, without using the most up-to-date methods and achievements
of capitalism. The difference was that under capitalism these methods aimed
at increasing the exploitation of workers, while under socialism they aimed at
increasing production, and thereby raising the workers’ standard of living.
However, left-wing Bolsheviks objected strongly to this change of course
which seemed to them the opposite of worker control. They also believed that
since the proletarian revolution had now taken place, the state, in the words of
Marx, should be withering away. These latest developments suggested that the
state was becoming stronger. Instead of local Soviets and committees running
their area and their factory, everything was being brought under central control
by state commissars. Russia had exchanged private capitalism for state capital
ism, and ordinary workers were no better off. It is clear that Lenin and Trotsky
had intended some degree of central control right from the early days of the
Bolshevik government. Early in December the Supreme Council of National
Economy (Vesenkha) was set up. Always known by its initial letters - VSNKh - its
function was to plan, guide and co-ordinate the national economy, though the
details were vague. But in the spring of 1918 the economy was showing no signs
of recovery: there was widespread and ever-increasing unemployment and

severe food shortages in the cities. In February 1918 the daily bread ration in
Petrogracj fell to only two ounces (50 grams) per person, even for workers.
Hundreds, probably thousands of people fled to the countryside in search of
food, but this caused a labour shortage and even more factories had to close.
By this time the workers were losing their enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks, and
party membership was falling. The Petrograd party had about 40,000 members in
October 1917, but by August 1918 this had slumped to around 7000.9In the elec
tions to some town Soviets in central Russia in the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks
lost their majorities and they resorted to the use of force in order to keep control.
Paradoxically, however, at the time when support among industrial workers
seemed to be dwindling, the Bolsheviks were able to tighten their grip on the
state administration. This was possible because many workers had done well,
thanks to the Bolsheviks; hundreds of party members, for example, who had
started off as ordinary workers, had been promoted from the factory-floor to
become civil servants, public officers, organizers, managers and so on; it was in
their interests for the Bolshevik government to survive, and so this new bureau
cracy did its best to strengthen the Soviet state.
The ending of the war in March 1918 brought no immediate improvement; it
simply meant that the state stopped financing armaments production, leaving all
the factories producing war materials without any orders. It took some time to
switch back to ordinary peace-time production, and this caused further chaos
and unemployment. Russia lost so much territory by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
that it was bound to have an adverse effect on the economy.
5.3 Russia withdraws from the First World W ar

(a) The Bolsheviks* dilemmas
Lenin was anxious to deliver as soon as possible the peace which his slbgans had
been promising. Only two weeks after the Bolsheviks seized power all Russian
troops were ordered to cease fire. The Germans welcomed this move and peace
talks opened at the German military headquarters at Brest-Litovsk in Poland,
just inside the German lines. During the negotiations the Bolsheviks faced two
different dilemmas. The first problem was that although they wanted to keep their
promise and bring Russia back to something like peace and normality, there had
still been no successful revolutions in other parts of Europe. Lenin thought these
were vital to the survival of his regime and that they were less likely to happen if
peace was restored. So the Bolsheviks' tactics were to try and spin the talks out
in the hope that revolutions would break out in the states of central Europe, par
ticularly in Austria where the population was showing distinct signs of unrest.
The other great dilemma for the Russians was caused by the German attitude
at the peace talks. The Russians were hoping, unrealistically, that goodwill would
prevail on both sides, and that the Germans would be so grateful to secure an
end to the fighting on their eastern front that they would not insist on annexing
any Russian territory. But the Germans had their own designs on the Russian
empire: for Germany to feel secure she needed a weak Russia on her eastern
»
frontier; German businessmen and bankers were interested in getting their
hands on Russia’s economic resources. The best way to achieve both of these
aims was to break up the Russian empire and either annex the western provinces
directly or have them set up as small independent states which Germany could
dominate. Consequently the Germans refused to withdraw from the provinces
around the southern Baltic - Lithuania and Courland - and from Poland. In addi
tion Austria-Hungary demanded part of the Ukraine» which was a valuable
source of wheat. In fact the Bolsheviks had already made it known that they
would allow independence to all these provinces as well as to Finland, although
the intention was that they would eventually all become Soviet republics. This
was another reason why the German government wanted to keep these territor
ies under their control; if Soviet governments came to power, revolution might
spread from these states into Germany itself. This situation was complicated
further when an anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian nationalist delegation turned up at
Brest-Litovsk; the nationalists had already declared an independent Ukrainian
republic, and they now demanded that the conference should officially recognize
their independence.
The German demands caused the most bitter disagreement so far in Sovnarkom.
A majority of members wanted to reject the terms and begin hostilities again.
In the Bolshevik Central Committee the voting was much closer, but Nikolai
Bukharin and his supporters had a majority in favour of fighting a ‘revolutionary
war’ against Germany and her allies, which, they argued, was the best way of
sparking off more revolutions. Lenin opposed this; he reasoned that the terms
must be accepted in spite of their harshness, and pointed out that the Russian
army by this time was not even capable of organizing a retreat. A temporary
compromise was reached early in January 1918: no final decision would be taken
on whether to accept or reject the terms until a plan suggested by Trotsky had
been tried. Trotsky had taken over the leadership of the Russian delegation at
Brest-Litovsk in December 1917; on 28 January he revealed his proposal to the
astonished Germans and Austrians. He told them that their terms were un
acceptable, but that his government had decided on a policy of ‘no peace, no
war’. The Russians would stop fighting but they would not surrender and they
would not sign a treaty. Nothing like this had ever been experienced in the entire
history of peace negotiations. Leaving the Germans in a state of shock, Trotsky
walked out of the conference and took the Russian delegation back to Petrograd.
The Russians’ reasoning was that if the Germans continued to advance deeper
into Russian territory, it would seem to the rest of the world like an act of pure
aggression against a country which wanted only peace. The Russians were too
weak to stop the Germans anyway, if they did choose to advance, so at least
Trotsky’s plan would leave them in possession of the moral high ground. But the
Germans did not co-operate - they soon announced that hostilities would begin
again in two days' time. Lenin wanted to accept the treaty immediately to forestall
the threatened German advance, but was outvoted. Only a week after Trotsky
had walked out the Germans began to advance through Estonia, and in five days
covered 150 miles, as much as they had achieved during the previous three years.
There was no Russian resistance. There was consternation in Petrograd; Lenin
was afraid that the Germans were aiming to capture the capital and overthrow

the Bolshevik government. Still the Bukharin-Trotsky faction wanted to delay
signing ß peace treaty; only after Lenin had threatened to resign did Trotsky
change his mind and support Lenin’s proposal to send an immediate telegram
accepting the German terms. But the Germans were in no hurry to reply; they
continued to advance until they were only 150 miles from Petrograd. Prepara
tions were started to move the government to Moscow, and panic set in as
thousands of people tried to flee from the city. There was no electricity, no fuel
and no medical services, and the railway stations were crammed with people
hoping to find a train to take them to safety.
At last on 23 February the Germans responded; they had decided not to cap
ture Petrograd - they preferred to keep the Bolsheviks in power, believing that
Russia would be weaker under their control. As one German writer put it: ‘the
Bolsheviks are ruining Great Russia, the source of any potential Russian future
danger, root and branch. They have already lifted most of that anxiety which we
might have felt about Great Russia, and we should do all we can to keep them as
long as possible carrying on their work, so useful to us.’10 However, their terms
were now much more harsh - they demanded to keep all the extra territory which
they had occupied during the previous ten days. Russia would therefore lose
Estonia, Livonia, Ukraine (where the independent republic had been officially
recognized and promised support by the Germans) and Finland. Other demands
were that Georgia was to be given independence, land in south-eastern Russia,
including Batum, was to be given to Turkey, and Russia was to pay reparations of
6000 million marks. The Russians were given two weeks to decide whether or not
to accept these new terms.
(b) Final discussions and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk,

March 1918
Agonized discussions took place in the Central Committee. For Lèhin it was
a question of peace at any price; Russia had no effective army and he was
convinced that if they refused to sign now, the Germans would take Petrograd,
which would mean the end of the Soviet government. Peace was desperately
needed so that the Bolsheviks could consolidate their power and set Russia on
the road to recovery. Lenin seemed to have given up hope of immediate revolu
tions breaking out, and talked about sacrificing space in order to gain time.
He still seemed to believe that Russia would regain all the lost territory when the
revolutions did occur and socialist governments came to power in Germany and
Austria-Hungary.
Against this, Bukharin and his supporters argued that Russia would be eco
nomically crippled by these territorial losses, especially Ukraine which was their
main food supply area. They wanted to take up the fight again and claimed that it
should be possible to raise a new and enthusiastic army to defend the revolution;
the nearer the Germans got to Petrograd, the more inspired the Russian masses
would become. Lenin won the argument, pointing out that Bukharin was to blame
for the harshness of the latest terms - if it hadn’t been for Bukharin’s stubborn
refusal, Lenin would have accepted the earlier offer. In the end, after further
i
Map 5.1 Russian losses by the Treaty ofBrest-Litovsk, 1918.
threats of resignation, Lenin carried the day by seven votes to four with four
abstentions. The Treaty ofBrest-Litovsk was finally ratified on 16 March 1918.
The terms of the treaty were a national disaster (see Map 5.1): Russia lost most
of its non-Russian territories in Europe - Poland, Estonia, Courland, Lithuania
and Finland, together with Belorussia and Georgia were given independence,
but under German ‘protection’. Ukraine was occupied by German troops and the
Germans replaced the Ukrainian nationalist government with a puppet regime of
their own and suppressed the Ukrainian Soviet. In total these areas contained
34 per cent of the empire’s population (some 55 million), 32 per cent of agricul
tural land, 54 per cent of all heavy industry and 89 per cent of her coalmines.
In addition the Germans were allowed important economic privileges in Russia -
for example German-owned property was exempt from nationalization. This
‘shameful’ and ‘obscene’ peace, as Lenin's critics described it, meant that
economic recovery was going to be even more difficult and it left the country
politically unstable: instead of a cordon of friendly Soviet-run states along her
western frontier, Russia now had potentially hostile countries under German
influence. The loss of Ukraine, the main grain-producing area, was especially
serious and meant that famine was almost inevitable in some areas. Within
Russia there was widespread opposition to the treaty. The Left SRs resigned from
Sovnarkom and the Right SRs began to build up forces in preparation for armed
resistance against the Bolsheviks in Siberia and in the Don area. On 6 July 1918
Lenin and th e Bolsheviks in power 135

two Left SR members assassinated Count Mirbach, the new German ambassador
in Moscow (which became the capital on 10 March) in a vain attempt to destroy
the peace with Germany. It was too late for that now, but clearly the communist
government (the name of the party was officially changed from Bolshevik to
Communist on 8 March) was iii serious crisis.
5.4 The drift towards violence

(a) Was violence an inevitable part of Bolshevik rule?
Almost immediately after the October coup the Bolsheviks began to resort to
coercion in order to get things done and to stay in power. This raises the ques
tion: were coercion and violence inevitable in these circumstances, or could the
Bolshevik programme have been achieved peacefully? Soviet historians played
down the violence and claimed that the Bolsheviks had no choice, given the
attitude of their enemies (see Document D(ii)). After the signing of the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk, it was the Socialist Revolutionaries who launched a campaign of
assassination and terror, and before long Russia was engulfed in the Civil War.
There is some evidence that in those crucial early months before the Civil War
proper got under way, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders would have preferred to
avoid violence. The socialist writer and novelist Maxim Gorky probably knew
Lenin as well as anybody and he was certainly not an uncritical admirer. His
newspaper Novaya Zhizn (New Life) often carried articles denouncing Bolshevik
excesses and in 1917 he had condemned Lenin as a fanatic and as the destroyer
of the Social Democratic tradition. Later he wrote letters to all the Bolshevik
leaders, protesting about unnecessary arrests (see Document F(i)). After the assas
sination attempt on Lenin on 30 August 1918 the two men renewed their friend
ship and Gorky eventually came to have a clearer understanding of Lenin’s
reasoning. He later wrote: T have never met anyone in Russia, nor do'l know of
anyone, who hated, loathed and despised all unhappiness, grief and suffering as
Lenin did.’ Gorky also reported that Lenin had once said to him: ‘Our ideal is not
to use force against anyone.'11
According to Christopher Hill, ‘there was no wholesale suppression of the
opposition press during the six months immediately after the Bolshevik revolu
tion, and no violence against political opponents, because there was no need for
it. The death sentence was even abolished at the end of October, though Lenin
thought this very unrealistic. When the first attempt was made to assassinate
Lenin in January 1918, he treated the matter as a joke and insisted that his assail
ant should be liberated. The terror came later and was a direct consequence of
allied military intervention.’12 Lenin himself remarked early in November: ‘We
do not use the sort of terror as was used by the French revolutionaries who
guillotined unarmed people, and I hope we shall not have to use it. When we
have made arrests we have said: ‘‘We will let you go if you sign a piece of paper
promising not to commit acts of sabotage”. And such signatures are given.’ This
was certainly the case with the members of the Provisional Government who
were arrested, together with large numbers of officers who had supported them.
i '
They were almost all eventually released after promising ‘not to take up arms
against the people any more;’ but that did not prevent them from joining the
Whites during the civil war. Even the Cheka, Lenin’s new secret police, got off to
a quiet start: in the first six months of its existence it only had 22 people executed,
and they were described as bandits and speculators rather than political oppo
nents; most of those arrested were released after a few weeks.13
It was the chronic food shortages which, first caused the Bolsheviks to take des
perate measures - and the situation really was desperate. Early in January 1918
Lenin sent telegraph messages to government agents in the provinces: ‘For God’s
sake use the most energetic and revolutionary measures to send grain, grain and
more grain. Otherwise Piter [Petrograd] may perish.’ Lenin was convinced that
the kulaks were hoarding huge quantities of grain in an attempt to force up the
price. Although he was probably mistaken about the existence of a distinct kulak
class, there is evidence of hoarding - according to one historian of the Civil War,
W. Bruce Lincoln, ‘at midsummer [1918] kulak storehouses probably still con
tained nearly three-quarters of a million tons of grain from the 1917 harvest plus
a great deal more from earlier years.' In addition there were enormous amounts
of grain which the peasants distilled into rough vodka known as samogon; it is
estimated that in just one province in Siberia, a quarter of a million tons of
precious grain were distilled during the winter of 1917-18. One village was dis
covered where peasants had distilled enough grain to feed a town of ten thousand
people through the winter. Vodka could be sold much more profitably than grain
and since the peasants were unable to buy consumer goods such as tools and
boots because factories had concentrated on war supplies, they simply refused to
sell their grain at the low prices on offer.14
The dire food situation gave the Cheka (set up in December 1917) its first
important role - to deal with people hoarding grain or trying to speculate with
important supplies. ‘There will be no famine in Russia,’Lenin said in April 1918, ‘if
stocks are controlled, and any breach of the rules laid down is followed by the
harshest punishment - the arrest and shooting of takers of bribes and swindlers.’
In May he announced: ‘Those who have grain and fail to deliver it to properly des
ignated railway stations and shipping points are to be declared enemies of the
people.’ Shortly afterwards he launched ‘a great crusade against grain speculators,
kulaks, and bloodsuckers, who... after growing fat and rich during the war, now
refuse to give bread to starving people... it must become a pitiless struggle... Until
we apply terror - shooting on the spot - to speculators, we shall achieve nothing.’15
It was after the signing of the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk early in
March 1918 that things took a turn for the worse. The loss of the Ukraine, a vitally
important source of wheat, was a terrible blow to hopes of ending the food crisis.
The Left SRs were determined to wreck the treaty and began a campaign of
terror: in June they shot dead a leading Bolshevik member of the Petrograd
Soviet, and on 6 July they assassinated Count Mirbach, the German ambassador
in Moscow. This turned out to be the beginning of an attempted SR coup in
Moscow, Petrograd and some other cities - the same day SRs arrested some lead
ing Bolsheviks including Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, and occupied the
main Moscow post office. Messages were sent out to all Soviets announcing that
the Left SRs were now ‘the party in power’. However, their plans to kill Lenin and

Trotsky somehow went adrift and the whole coup attempt deteriorated into
a fiasco. Order was soon restored by Red Guards in both Moscow and Petrograd
and in the other centres of uprising. It is now widely believed that the SRs were
not aiming to seize power themselves but were hoping to spark off a popular
uprising to force the Bolsheviks to change their policies. There is evidence too
that the Bolsheviks knew of the SRs' intention to assassinate Mirbach but allowed
them to go ahead so that the SRs could be blamed, giving the Bolsheviks an excuse
for an attack on their former allies. Whatever the truth of the SR ‘coup’ attempt,
the Bolsheviks certainly made the most of it; mass arrests began immediately,
13 of the ringleaders were shot the next day, and the Socialist Revolutionaries
soon ceased to exist as a viable political force.
The pace of violence and terror intensified after the second assassination
attempt on Lenin (30 August 1918). Earlier in the day Moise Uritsky, the head of
the Petrograd Cheka, had been shot dead by a young army officer. Lenin had just
made a speech in a Moscow factory and was walking to his car when a woman
shot him twice with a revolver at point-blank range. Although he was wounded in
the neck and in one of his lungs, Lenin seemed to make a quick recovery and was
able to resume work after only three weeks. However, some accounts claim that
it was shortly after this that his health began to deteriorate, and that he never
again possessed the same degree of vitality. The woman, Fanny Kaplan, who said
she had shot Lenin because he had betrayed the revolution, was executed a few
days later. The attacks were the signal for a policy of all-out terror in which
thousands of people perished.
All this evidence can be interpreted as supporting the. view that it was the
desperate circumstances of the time - the food shortages, the unemployment in
the big cities, the threat from the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, and the attacks
on Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, which drove the Bolsheviks towards viol
ence and terror, rather than any inherent ideological motive. The problem was
that however well-intentioned the Bolsheviks were, Lenin’s reasoning was fatally
flawed in two vital respects. First of all his insistence that the two revolutions -
bourgeois and proletarian - could be successfully telescoped together, led to the
situation in which the Bolsheviks were in power before their most reliable sup
porters - the industrial workers - had become a large or powerful enough class to
sustain them. This left the Bolsheviks as a minority government, uncomfortably
dependent on the largest, but most self-absorbed class in Russian society - the
peasants. Secondly, Lenin had always expected that a successful revolution in
Russia would occur as part of a European or even a world-wide socialist revolu
tion. He was convinced that socialist revolutions would quickly follow in central
and western Europe, so that the new Russian Soviet government would be sup
ported by sympathetic, comradely neighbouring governments. None of this had
happened, so Russia was left isolated facing a capitalist Europe which was deeply
suspicious of the new regime. This meant therefore that both internally and
externally the regime was under pressure from the forces of counter-revolution.
Law and order seemed to be breaking down and local Soviets simply ignored the
government’s decrees. If the Bolsheviks intended to stay in power and rebuild
the country, regrettably they would more than likely have to resort to violence to
achieve anything significant.
• '
Traditional liberal and neo-liberal historians emphasize that Lenin and
Trotsky, if not all the Bolshevik leaders, were committed to the use of violence
and terror right from the beginning, whatever the circumstances. Richard Pipes
believes that Lenin regarded terror as an absolutely vital element of revolution
ary government and was prepared to use it as a preventive measure, even when
no active opposition to his rule existed. In a 1908 essay about the failure of the
French revolutionaries, Lenin wrote that the main weakness of the proletariat was
‘excessive generosity - it should have exterminated its enemies instead of trying
to exert moral influence over them.’ Lenin was highly indignant when the death
penalty was abolished, retorting: ‘This is nonsense, how can you make a revolu
tion without executions.’ Yet this was at a time when no organized opposition
had been formed. Again, the Cheka was set up early in December 1917 before
there was any opposition threat or foreign intervention - the reason suggested by
Christopher Hill for the resort to violence. Some of Trotsky’s utterances were of
a similar nature to those of Lenin; on 2 December 1917 he said: ‘There is nothing
immoral in the proletariat finishing off the dying class... You are indignant at the
petty terror which we direct against our class opponents. Be put on notice that in
one month at most this terror will assume more frightful forms, on the model of
the great revolutionaries of France.’ This is the sort of evidence which leads
Richard Pipes to conclude that ‘it is absurd to talk of Red Terror as an ‘‘unfortu
nate" policy “forced" upon the Bolsheviks by foreign and domestic opponents...
terror served the Bolsheviks not as a weapon of last resort, but as a surrogate for
the popular support which eluded them. The more their popularity eroded, the
more they resorted to terror, until in the fall and winter of 1918-19 they raised it
to a level of indiscriminate slaughter never before seen.'16
(b) The violence unfolds

As soon as the grain detachments began to operate, taking grain away from
peasants who were thought to have surpluses, there were violent responses.
The committees of poor peasants (see section 5.2(a)) aroused ferocious resist
ance in many villages and the Red Army was used increasingly to enforce the
food procurement policy. The government eventually ordered that every food
requisitioning detachment must consist of at least 75 men with two or three
machine guns. In June 1918 there were about 3000 of these detachments, and by
the end of August the number had risen to over 17,000. Increasingly the Cheka
became involved - in 1918 the Cheka suppressed no fewer than 245 peasant
uprisings against the food detachments and 99 in the first seven months of 1919.
In the course of these operations, 3057 peasants and 1150 on the Red side were
killed; by the end of 1918, according to official Cheka figures, 6300 people had
been executed for taking part in uprisings or ‘embezzlement’, and during 1919
there were a further 3456 executions. However, it is certain that the actual death
toll during this period was much higher.17
One of the most disturbing aspects of the violence was that many of the vic
tims were arrested or executed not for any particular offence, but simply because
they were ‘bourgeois’ - a term of abuse levelled against people like businessmen,
employers, army officers, landowners, priests, students, or indeed any sort of

professional or well-dressed person. The government encouraged this class war
by labelling them all as ‘enemies of the people' and using slogans like Toot the
looters’. Not that the masses needed much encouragement: a policy of terror
could hardly have been carried out without the willing co-operation of large
sections of the population. Some of the most violent incidents occurred inde
pendently of any central direction, and often the strongest demands for execu
tions came from local Soviets rather than the Cheka. This desire for revenge and
retribution against the privileged - ‘the scoundrel fleas, the bedbug rich,’ as
Lenin once described them - was strong and widespread. In fact Orlando Figes
believes that ‘the Terror erupted from below. It was an integral element of the
social revolution from the start. The Bolsheviks encouraged but did not create
this mass terror. The main institutions of the terror were all shaped, at least in
part, in response to these pressures from below... For however much one may
condemn it, and however hard it may be to admit, there is no doubt that the
Terror struck a deep chord in the Russian civil war mentality, and that it had
a strange mass appeal.’18
It has to be remembered that there was a climate of violence and repression in
Russia stretching back over many years. There was a long history of peasant
revolts, like the ones led by the Cossacks Stenka Razin in 1670-71 and Emilian
Pugachev in 1773. The collapse of such outbreaks was always followed by severe
reprisals against their supporters; both Razin and Pugachev were brought to
Moscow, tortured and then executed. During 1906 the tsarist regime carried out
a harsh campaign against those who had taken part in the uprisings - estimates
put the number executed at 15,000, with 20,000 shot or wounded and 45,000
exiled. The right-wing Black Hundreds waged campaigns of terror against Jews -
over 3000 were murdered in the two weeks following the announcement of the
October Manifesto in 1905. There were more anti-Jewish pogroms during the
Civil War - some sources suggest that during 1919 in Ukraine alone, as many as
200,000 Jews were murdered by White forces.19 Not that any of this excuses the
Bolshevik terror, particularly since they claimed to have humanitarian ideals, but
it certainly goes a long way towards explaining it.
One of the worst incidents of the Terror was the murder of the ex-Tsar
Nicholas and his family. When the Bolsheviks took power the royal family were
moved from Tobolsk in Siberia to Yekaterinburg in the Urals, where they were
kept under guard in a large house which had belonged to a merchant called
Ipatiev. Trotsky wanted Nicholas to be brought to Moscow and put on trial, but
Lenin would not agree. By the summer of 1918 when the Civil War was in full
swing, the question of what to do with the royal family became more urgent.
White forces were advancing from the east towards Yekaterinburg and there
seemed a strong possibility that the family would be rescued; they might then
become the focus of all the anti-Bolshevik forces. Whether he seriously believed
this, or whether he simply used it as an excuse is not clear; but there is no doubt
that it was Lenin who gave the order for them to be killed. In the early hours of
18 July 1918 Nicholas and Alexandra, their four daughters and their son Alexei,
were taken from their beds and into the cellar of the Ipatiev house. There,
together with their doctor, cook, valet and housemaid, they were lined up against
the wall and shot by members of the local Cheka. After sulphuric acid was poured
i *
on their faces, the bodies were buried; the graves were only discovered after the
collapse of the Soviet empire. In 1992 some of the bones were subjected to DNA
analysis which showed conclusively that they were the remains of the Romanovs;
it seems certain that the whole family perished together in the cellar of the
Ipatiev house on 18 July.20 The following day the official announcement of the
death of Nicholas appeared in Izvestia, but no mention was made of the deaths of
the rest of the family. This was kept secret because the Bolsheviks were afraid of
public outrage if it became known that they had murdered innocent women and
children; also there was the fear that the Germans would be incensed by the
murder of Alexandra, who was a German princess. Coming so soon after the
assassination of their ambassador (6 July), this could spark off a renewal of
the war. According to Robert Service, Lenin ‘exterminated the Romanovs because
they had misruled Russia... but also because he enjoyed - really enjoyed - letting
himself loose against the people in general from the ancien regime. He hated not
only the Imperial family but also the middling people who had controlled Russia
before 1917.'21
5.5 The Civil W ar

(a) When did the war start and what caused it?
There is still disagreement among historians as to exactly when the Civil War
started. The majority date the war proper from the summer of 1918, though there
had been several military engagements before then. One British historian of the
war, Evan Mawdsley, argues that it really began as soon as the Bolsheviks took
power, since almost immediately afterwards there was bloodshed, with Russian
fighting Russian. Throughout the winter of 1917-18 there was ‘internal fighting of
an intensity that can only be called “civil war”.’22 Lenin and his colleagues had
expected some resistance but assumed that it would be easily dealt with. And so
it was in the early days. In December 1917 Bolshevik forces invaded Ukraine and
by the end of January had chased out the anti-Bolshevik council known as the
Rada. However, this success was only short-lived - the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
signed in March made the Ukraine into an independent state, under German
influence. Successful actions took place against the hostile Don Cossacks in
January 1918 and the important Cossack centres of Rostov and Novocherkassk
were captured towards the end of February. Another challenge to the Bolsheviks
was being prepared by generals Alexeev, Kornilov and Denikin who formed the
Volunteer Army; in April they attacked Ekaterinodar, capital of the Kuban Soviet
Republic, north-east of the Black Sea. They met fierce resistance and disaster
struck when Kornilov, the hero of the right during the Provisional Government,
was killed. His successor, Denikin, abandoned the siege; Lenin celebrated this
as a great victory and announced that the Civil War was over. In fact it was
just about to erupt into a full-scale military conflict. Why did the war escalate in
this way?
Opposition had been growing for some time among most social and political
groups in Russian society - peasants, industrial workers, the middle classes,

army officers, Socialist Revolutionaries, right-wingers and monarchists. Better-off
peasants soon turned against the Bolsheviks when the government launched its
drive to get sufficient food supplies to the cities. Private trade in grain was
banned, so that peasants could only sell to government officials. They were paid
for their produce, but they felt that the prices were too low and refused to sell.
Lenin sent out armed requisitioning detachments who seized whatever grain
they could find, whether it was surplus to the peasants’ requirements or not.
At the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets which opened in the Bolshoi Theatre
in Moscow on 5 July 1918, Maria Spiridonova, one of the SR leaders, launched
a bitter attack on Lenin for his ‘dictatorship of individuals in love with their
theories... I accuse you of betraying the peasants, of making use of them for
your own ends... When the peasants, the Bolshevik peasants, the Left Social
Revolutionary peasants and the non-party peasants are alike humiliated,
oppressed and crushed, in my^hand you will still find the same pistol, the same
hand grenade. . . ,23
Another important cause of the growing opposition was the Bolsheviks' treat
ment of the local Soviets. The workers, soldiers and sailors who had supported
the Bolshevik coup believed they were going to get Soviet rule, which they took to
mean self-rule, not rule by the Bolshevik party. Their expectation was that every
city, town and factory would elect its own Soviet to run its affairs; in this way
workers and ordinary people would take control of their own lives. There would
be only minimal interference from the government in Moscow; this was the
sense in which the state would ‘wither away’, as the Marxists believed. But the
reality was different: as the Bolsheviks began to lose their majorities on local
Soviets, the government responded by sending commissars supported by Red
Guards and often some Cheka officers as well. They threw out all non-Bolshevik
members of the Soviets and sometimes dissolved the local Soviet altogether,
leaving the commissar in control. There was resistance in several places and the
popular slogan became ‘Long live the Soviets and down with the commissars’.
As for the question of workers running their own factories, this became' almost
irrelevant in some cities; in Petrograd, for example, by mid-March 1918, the daily
bread ration had reached its lowest ever - 50 grams per person. By June about
60 per cent of the workforce had left the city in search of food, and the total
population of Petrograd had fallen from three million to less than two million.
There was a nationalist element in the growing resistance to Bolshevik rule.
Nationalities such as Ukrainians and Georgians hoped to gain independence
from Russia, but the Bolsheviks were not interested in giving way to what they
called ‘bourgeois nationalism’. They claimed that the majority of the people -
peasants and workers - were happy with the Bolshevik reforms and wanted to
stay with their Great Russian comrades. The nationalist armies became known as
the Greens, of which the most famous was that led by the anarchist Nestor
Makhno in the south-eastern Ukraine. By the summer of 1918 no fewer than
30 regions had declared themselves independent republics, and all but one were
hostile to the Bolsheviks.
Foreign intervention in Russia complicated the situation and at first there was
confusion about what the real motives of the foreign powers were. Britain and
France were desperate to keep Russia in the First World War so that the Germans
i '
would be unable to divert their eastern-front forces to the west. They offered the
new Bolshevik government the same support in the way of military equipment
and funding which they had given the Provisional Government. During the
German advance into Russia in February 1918 Trotsky decided to accept any help
on offer from Russia's allies. The first to arrive was a small party of 170 British
marines who landed at Murmansk, a port north of the Arctic Circle, the day after
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed. A further 600 arrived in June, followed in
August by a small joint Anglo-French force which arrived at Archangelsk, also in
the far north, on the White Sea. These were the only Russian ports in Europe that
the allies could reach so long as the First World War continued. The first arrivals
were quickly followed by other foreign contingents: in April a Japanese force
arrived at Vladivostock, Russia’s main port in the far east. Later they were joined
by troops from France, Britain, the USA and Italy. The French set up a base at the
port of Odessa on the Black Sea, and more British forces moved into Transcauca
sia in the south and into Central Asia. Initially the British and French claimed
that their motive was to prevent war supplies, which they had previously brought
to Russia and which were sdll there, from falling into German hands. They all
claimed that they were in Russia to protect their interests, but Lenin and Trotsky
had no doubts that their real motive was to help overthrow the Bolshevik regime,
which the rest of the world viewed with the greatest suspicion, since it was
advocating ‘world revolution’ and refusing to honour debts incurred by previous
Russian governments.
A number of former Tsarist generals had fled from the Bolsheviks and built
up White armies: Generals Denikin and Alexeev were in southern Russia in the
Caucasus region with the White Volunteer Army of tsarists and former Kadets.
In Siberia Admiral Kolchak was at the head of an army and was being hailed as
‘Supreme Ruler of Russia’. Another apparently more serious threat, since he was
much nearer Petrograd and Moscow, came from General Iudenich who formed
a White Army in Estonia; he was one of the few successful Russian generals in the
First World War and had never lost a battle. In Finland General Gustav Manner-
heim led the Finnish White army which overthrew the Finnish Reds and took
control of the country in April 1918. They received help from German troops who
landed on the south coast of Finland and captured Helsinki from the Red Finns.
Petrograd seemed under threat from this direction as well as from Estonia. In
May 1918 a group of leading SRs gathered in Samara on the Volga and set up
what they called a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (known
as Komuch), claiming that it was the legal government of Russia. The Volga
region was one of the strongholds of the SR party and there seemed every chance
that the population would rally behind them.
What seemed to galvanize all these disparate groups into action was the presence
in Siberia of an army of around 40,000 Czechoslovaks. They had a strange his
tory: the army had started with several thousand Czechs who were working in
Russia in 1914 when the war broke out. Their homeland was part of the Austro-
Hungarian empire, the enemy of Russia, but they decided to stay on and fight on
the Russian side in the hope that the defeat of Austria-Hungary would mean
freedom for their nation and a Czechoslovak state. The force grew with the
recruitment of thousands of Czech and Slovak prisoners taken by the Russians

Map 5.2 'The Civil War.
14 4 Mastering T w e n tie th -C e n tu ry Russian H isto ry
during their successful offensives against the Austro-Hungarian fronts. In March
1918 when Russia left the war, there seemed to be no longer any role for them.
Their main interest was national independence, but with Austria-Hungary still
involved in the war, they could not simply go straight home, since this would
involve crossing the battle-lines from the Russian side. So the Bolshevik govern
ment agreed to let them leave the country from Vladivostock in the far east, to
which they would travel along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Their intendon was to
make their way around towards the western front and rejoin the allies in the
struggle against the Central Powers. However, tensions mounted along the way;
the Czechs had been allowed to keep their weapons for self-defence, but this
caused suspicion among local Soviets who kept holding up the trains. The
Czechs also distrusted the Bolsheviks whom they suspected of planning to hand
them over to the Germans.
The threatened violence eventually erupted on 14 May 1918 when one of the
trains reached Chelyabinsk just east of the Ural Mountains. A brawl developed
between a group of Czechs and some Hungarian prisoners of war; the local
Soviet ordered the arrest of the Czechs, to which other Czechs responded by
taking control of the town until their comrades were released. Trotsky, now
Commissar for War, ordered that all further movement of the legion eastwards
must cease immediately and all Soviets along the railway were to disarm the
Czechs, who must be made to join either the Red Army or a labour battalion. Any
Czech found on the railway in possession of weapons was to be executed on the
spot. This was an unnecessary overreaction by Trotsky; all the Czechs wanted
was to escape from Russia as quickly as possible, and in any case government
forces in the area were too weak to carry out the order. The Czechs, who were
spread out in six separate groups along the railway, replied that they would only
surrender their arms when they reached Vladivostock. Fearful that the Bol
sheviks would hand them over to the Germans, they decided to take control of
the Trans-Siberian Railway. During the next two weeks they occupied Mariinsk,
Novonikolaevsk, Chelyabinsk, Penza, Tomsk, Omsk and Samara (9 June 1918).
Vladivostock was taken on 29 June, Ufa on 6 July and Irkutsk, where the Bolsheviks
put up the strongest resistance so far encountered by the Czechs, was captured
on 11 July. By this time the government had completely lost control of the Trans-
Siberian Railway east of Samara. It was ironic that this foreign army, trying to
fight its way out of Russia, provided the stimulus for the Whites to take decisive
action to bring down the Bolshevik regime.
(b) Military events in the Civil W ar

The war was an extremely complex and confusing affair, but the basic story line
was simple: the Reds (Bolsheviks or Communists), who by the summer of 1918
controlled a relatively small but compact area of European Russia around
Moscow and Petrograd, were attacked by the Whites on four main fronts. There
was Kolchak in the east in Siberia, Denikin and his Volunteer Force in the south
in the Caucasus, in the west there was Iudenich advancing from Estonia, and the
Czech legion was in control of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Fortunately for the
Reds there was no co-ordination between the various White armies, and after

Trotsky had created a new Red Army, the Reds were able to defeat the challenges
one by one. The Civil War proper was over by November 1920. It was a war of
movement over large distances determined mainly by the layout of the railway
network; and it was a war marked by extreme brutality on both sides.
The main action during the remainder of 1918 took place in the east and south.
The Czechs continued their successes by capturing Simbirsk (Lenin's birthplace)
and Kazan. Trotsky took personal command of the forces in this theatre of war
and soon recaptured Simbirsk and Kazan together with Ufa and Samara. Mean
while in the south Stalin successfully organized the defence of Tsaritsyn which
was being besieged by Denikin’s forces. However, the year ended in defeats for
the Reds; supporters of Admiral Kolchak overthrew the newly formed SR domi
nated, anti-Bolshevik government at Omsk and took control; Kolchak was
declared Supreme Ruler of Russia. In December Kolchak's forces advanced
westwards and captured Perrp.
The ending of the First World War in November 1918 had important implica
tions for Russia. Now that Russia's former allies had defeated the Central Powers,
there seemed a strong possibility that they would turn their forces against the
Bolsheviks, whose activities were viewed as increasingly unacceptable. These
actions included the terror, the murder of the royal family, the formation of the
Communist International (known as the Comintern) in 1919, an organization
dedicated to the incitement of revolutions in other countries (see section 5.7(a)),
and the announcement that the Bolsheviks would not honour the debts incurred
by previous Russian governments. However, the threatened anti-Bolshevik cru
sade failed to materialize. More important was that the German defeat got rid of
German troops from Ukraine and other parts of western and central Russia.
The year 1919 saw fierce fighting on three fronts as the Whites launched three
separate offensives. All three had some initial successes, but by the end of the
year they had all been halted and forced to retreat. In the east Kolchak captured
Ufa and advanced towards the Volga. At the end of April the Reds began a coun
ter-offensive which drove Kolchak back eastwards; Yekaterinburg fell to the Reds
in July and Omsk in November; Kolchak retreated to Irkutsk in central Siberia.
Meanwhile in May Denikin’s Volunteer Army moved northwards again, this time
with more success than in 1918. Kharkov and Tsaritsyn were captured in June,
followed by Kiev, the capital of Ukraine (August). On 12 September Denikin gave
the order to advance on Moscow, and on 14 October his forces captured Orel,
less than 250 miles from Moscow. Their next objective was the city of Tula, half
way between Orel and Moscow. The Reds decided that the fall of Tula must be
prevented at all costs. What made the situation more difficult for them was that
Iudenich was at the same time advancing on Petrograd. However, the Reds were
able to rush troops from the eastern front where the threat from Kolchak seemed
to be over. Red troops moved against the Volunteer Army and it was clear that
this would be one of the decisive battles of the war. Denikin had almost 100,000
troops whereas the Reds commanded by general Yegorov had around 186,000.
The battle took place on 18-20 October; as the White forces were advancing
towards Tula, the Reds launched a surprise attack on their left flank, and after
heavy fighting Denikin was forced to evacuate Orel and retreat southwards to
Kursk. When Yegorov’s troops were joined by reinforcements, including cavalry
t
divisions, the retreat became a rout, discipline broke down and what was left of
the Volunteer Force fled towards the Black Sea.
The attack from the west was the one which came closest to ultimate success.
Iudenich began his advance against Petrograd on 11 October and within five
days he had reached Tsarskoe Selo, only 15 miles from the city. The Red forces
were apparently demoralized by the appearance of tanks manned by British
soldiers, although there were only six of them. The British navy helped by
bombarding the naval base at Kronstadt, severely damaging two Red battleships.
Lenin seemed to have given up hope of holding Petrograd, feeling that it was
more important to save Moscow from Denikin. But Trotsky had other ideas: he
went to Petrograd, took charge of the army himself, and somehow succeeded in
restoring morale. He had the Putilov factory produce some mock-ups which
looked like tanks, and riding on horseback, he actually led a detachment of
troops into battle. Within a couple of weeks Iudenich's army was forced to retreat
into Estonia where it was disarmed (see Document D). In December an armistice
was signed between Estonia and Russia.
In 1920 most of the loose ends were tied up. First of all, in February, a formal
peace treaty was signed between Russia and Estonia. Later in the year Latvia,
Lithuania and Finland signed agreements in which Russia recognized them all as
independent states. In the east Kolchak came to a tragic end; deserted by most of
his army and betrayed by the Czech legion, he was handed over to the Bolsheviks
who executed him. In the south Denikin’s retreat continued to the Black Sea port
of Novorossiisk where about 50,000 of his troops embarked on British and
French ships and sailed to Sebastopol in the Crimea. On 2 April 1920 Denikin
resigned and was replaced by Wrangel; although he was able to restore discipline
and morale in the Volunteer Army, he was unable to prevent the Reds from occu
pying the whole of the Crimea. However, he succeeded in organizing the evacu
ation of over 80,000 troops and refugees aboard British and French ships. This
was completed on 14 November, the date taken by many historians as the official
end of the Civil War.
One problem still remained for the Reds to deal with - in April 1920 the Poles
had invaded Ukraine, though strictly speaking, this was not part of the civil war -
it was an attack on Russia by a foreign country. The Poles aimed to liberate
Ukraine from Russian control (Ukraine had passed back into Russian control
following the defeat of Germany in the First World War) and secure Ukrainian
recognition that eastern Galicia belonged to Poland. By 7 May the Poles had
captured Kiev, but the invasion seemed to cause outrage among all shades of
Russian opinion and rallied support for the government. With morale high, Red
forces drove the Poles out of Kiev and chased them back into Poland all the way
to Warsaw, which they prepared to attack in August. The Poles meanwhile had
offered to begin peace talks and to drop all their claims against Russia. This offer
was conveyed to the Russians by Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, who
suggested that the River Bug might serve as an armistice line. Lenin rejected the
offer, hoping that the Russian capture of Warsaw would spark off a proletarian
revolution in Poland which would in turn spread to other countries. However,
there was no uprising of the Polish masses, and when the Poles counter-attacked
on 16 August, the Russians were caught off guard and thrown into retreat.

Thanks to tactical blunders by the Russian commanders and inspired general
ship fronrMarshal Pilsudski, the Polish leader, the Russians accepted that their
attempt to control Poland had failed; an armistice was agreed in October 1920
followed by a formal peace treaty signed at Riga in March 1921. Russia made
some territorial gains, but overall it was a much worse deal than if they had
accepted the Curzon Line (see Map 5.2).
(c) Why did the Reds win the Civil War?

Although the Reds may have looked to be in a weak position, surrounded on all
sides by White armies, in fact they had vital advantages. Militarily they had the
advantage of a unified command and numerical superiority over the Whites.
In October 1918 the Red Army had about 430,000 men; Trotsky as Commissar
for War was responsible for building up the numbers - conscription was intro
duced and by the end of 1919 the total was approaching three million, including
61 rifle divisions and 12 cavalry divisions. The first commander, Ioachim Vatsetis,
had told Lenin that he needed such numbers since he had to think about cam
paigns ‘on all parts of the compass.' Lenin probably thought they would be
needed later to carry the revolution forward into the rest of Europe. By contrast
the White armies never totalled more than 250,000 at any one time. The Reds had
a great advantage in the supply of armaments since they controlled about three-
quarters of all the arms dumps and the factories capable of producing arms.24
In the early days of the war the Reds lacked sufficient experienced officers, but
Trotsky solved this problem by conscripting about 50,000 former Tsarist officers.
Some of the other Communist leaders were dismayed at this, fearing that they
could not be trusted; Trotsky made it work by pairing each officer with a com
missar or sometimes two; these were always reliable Bolsheviks, whose job was
to shadow the officer and countersign all orders. Sometimes members of an
officer’s family were taken as hostages to ensure his good behaviour, discipline
was extremely strict; the army was supervised by the Cheka and Trotsky insisted
that ‘all cowards, self-seekers and traitors will not escape the bullet’ If a regiment
abandoned its position, he had its commissar and commander executed and
then had selected soldiers shot at random from the ranks (see Document C).
This was all part of the ‘Red Terror’ first proclaimed officially on 2 September
1918 immediately after the assassination attempt on Lenin; it was intended to gal
vanize the masses into active support for the regime and to crush anti-Bolsheviks.
Although some leading Bolsheviks protested at this ‘bloody discipline', it probably
played an important part in ensuring the final Red victory. It certainly brought
remarkable results in the army and Trotsky continued to use it. He described the
policy as ‘a red-hot iron applied to a festering wound.'25Trotsky’s overall contri
bution to the Red victory has been a matter of some debate. Soviet historians
would not allow him any credit whatsoever, but this is not surprising given that
Trotsky and Stalin had never got on and that Trotsky was disgraced and exiled
after Stalin came to power. But there can be no doubt that Trotsky does deserve
the credit for the creation of a regular army and for providing a focus for it to rally
around. His famous double-headed train, in which he was said to have covered
65,000 miles during the war, contained a printing press, a telegraph system,

a radio station, an electricity generating station, a library and a garage which held
several cars.
Although the area controlled by the Reds looked small on the map in comparison
with White areas, it had the advantage of being central and compact. It contained
the majority of the country's population, heavy industry and administrative
apparatus. The railway network radiated outwards from Moscow, which was the
centre of the country’s communications and the Reds had much shorter lines of
communication than the Whites. The closer the White armies drew towards their
objectives - Moscow and Petrograd - the longer their lines of communication
became and they overreached themselves. On the whole it is probably true to say
that the urban working classes supported the Reds and so did the army of new
administrators and bureaucrats who owed their positions to the regime.
The communist government took decisive measures to make sure that all the
economic resources of the state were channelled into the war effort. This policy
became known as War Communism; it involved the extension of state control
over as much of the economy as possible. Nearly all industry was nationalized
and stocks of raw materials were allocated wherever necessary to meet the
demands of the military situation. Private trade was banned, though this was
very difficult to enforce, and a special Commissariat of Supplies CNarkomprod)
was given the job of getting sufficient food to the cities. This led to an intensifica
tion of grain requisitioning which was extremely unpopular with the producers.
In the words of Alec Nove, the essence of War Communism was ‘all these factors
combined with terror and arbitrariness, expropriations, requisitions. Efforts to
establish discipline, with party control over trade unions. A siege economy with
a communist ideology. A partly organized chaos. Sleepless, leather-jacketed com
missars working round the clock in a vain attempt to replace the free market.'26
Lenin also experimented cautiously with collective farms which he thought
would provide the magic solution to the food problem - though he knew that this
was a long way in the friture. By the end of 1918 some 3000 had been formed, but
their first harvests were not especially impressive and after that the pace slowed
down - by 1920 there were still only 4400 of them altogether. War Communism
was not a complete success - it failed to end the food shortages in the cities but
it did enable the government to feed and equip the Red Army.
Compared with these Red strengths the Whites had all the disadvantages. The
various White armies were widely separated geographically, they had very little
contact with each other and tended to operate as individual units, each with
its own distinct aims. There was no central control, no overall plan and no joint
strategy; the Reds were able to eliminate them one by one. The Whites lacked
first-rate politicians - neither Kolchak nor Denikin had any political experience
or instinct and both thought only in military terms, whereas the Reds had both
efficient generals and astute political leaders. Heavily outnumbered, the Whites
began to suffer from exhaustion and disease, especially typhus. There were prob
lems with the Whites' non-Russian supporters; at first many Finns, Estonians,
Latvians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians and Cossacks supported the Whites;
in fact the vast majority of Denikin’s army consisted of non-Russians. But as
it became clear that Denikin was a passionate Russian nationalist, whose slogan
was ‘Russia great and undivided', and was against giving independence to
Lenin and the Bolsheviks in power i 49

non-Russians, his support gradually melted away. The Whites refused to recognize
the independence of Finland, Estonia and Latvia, which lost them vital support.
Another problem for the Whites was harassment from the armies of anarchist
irregulars known as Greens, who opposed all authority. They were specialists in
guerrilla warfare and attacked both Reds and Whites. The most influential Green
army was probably that led by the Ukrainian anarchist, Nestor Makhno, which
at one point was thought to have numbered around 30,000 men. According to
W.B. Lincoln, Makhno had a deep belief in an egalitarian revolutionary order.
He was fighting for ‘a stateless communist society in which slavery will vanish
and state authority will have no place, where the land belongs to nobody and it
can be used only by those who care about it and cultivate it/ Makhno viewed
Denikin as the greatest enemy, operating in the south - in the Ukraine, the
Crimea and the Kuban - he and his partisan army did everything in their power
to harass Denikin. They raided his ammunition dumps and destroyed vital
reserves of shells just as he was about to launch his attack on Orel. They continued
to attack his supply lines so successfully that Denikin was forced to detach troops
to deal with them. An American pilot helping the Whites reported that 'Makhno
was looting trains and depots with impunity, and White officialdom was losing
what little control over the civilian population it had.’ In the end Makhno prob
ably contributed as much to the defeat of Denikin as the Reds did.27
Both Reds and Whites used methods of terror in the areas they controlled, to
conscript peasants and to seize their grain - usually without payment. As far as
ordinary people were concerned there was probably not much to choose between
them, but the Whites had one big disadvantage - they were seen by the peasants
as the representatives of the former landlords. The Reds were able to claim that if
the Whites won the war, the peasants would lose the land they had gained from
the revolution. The Whites did nothing to reassure the peasants on this score,
and so, as Kolchak moved into central Russia, it became more and more difficult
for them to get peasant support. White leaders seemed to assume that i^was the
duty of the peasants to fight for the White armies in the same way that they had
served in the tsarist army. If they refused they were whipped, flogged and tor
tured, and villages were burned. General Graves, the American commander in
Siberia, described how Kolchak’s cavalry would ride into towns on market days
and round up the young men at gunpoint and take them off to join the army. But
this tactic was disastrous - it destroyed the discipline and the morale of Kolchak’s
army because four out of every five peasants conscripted in this way deserted,
and many of them went to join the Reds, taking with them their weapons,
uniforms and supplies. The American troops were there in a neutral capacity to
help maintain the Trans-Siberian Railway, and Graves had plenty of opportunity
to observe what went on. He became increasingly disenchanted with Kolchak’s
regime which he regarded as corrupt, brutal and reactionary. ‘At no time while
I was in Siberia,’ he wrote, ‘was there enough popular support behind Kolchak
for him to have lasted one month if all allied support had been removed from
him ... I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed
a hundred people to every one killed by the Bolsheviks.’28
Finally Lenin was able to make great propaganda by claiming that the
Whites were responsible for the intervention of all the foreign troops in Russia.
i

He presented the Bolsheviks as the real patriots who were trying to clear the for
eigners out and preserve Russia’s independence. In fact the foreign intervention
never became a serious threat to the Bolsheviks, mainly because the victorious
powers were sick of war and were not impressed by the Whites who wasted much
of the war supplies sent to them and were generally seen as corrupt and incom
petent. As the White armies began to suffer defeats, the interventionist states lost
interest; by the end of 1920 all the foreign troops except the Japanese had been
withdrawn. Lenin was able to present this as a great victory and it did much to
restore Russia’s prestige after the humiliation of Brest-Litovsk.
(d) Effects of the Civil W ar

The war was a terrible tragedy for the Russian people - the most obvious effect
was the enormous cost in human lives and suffering. It is impossible to give any
accurate statistics since no records were kept and the administration was cha
otic. Evan Mawdsley quotes estimated statistics from several different sources
which suggest that the Red Army may have lost as many as 632,000 men killed in
battle and 581,000 who died from disease. The Whites may have lost a total of
1.29 million from deaths in battle and disease; typhus and typhoid were the main
killer diseases. In addition there were the victims among the civilian population
and the people killed in both the Red and White Terrors. No figures are given for
victims of the White Terror, but taking into account the White operations against
the Greens and against peasant partisans, and the White anti-Jewish pogroms,
the total number must have been in the tens of thousands. Estimates for those
killed in the Red Terror vary widely: the lowest figure given is 50,000 and the
highest a figure of 200,000 executed, plus 400,000 who died in prison or were
killed in the suppression of anti-Red revolts. It is when the deaths from disease
and famine are taken into account that the full horror of the Civil War becomes
apparent. Typhus and typhoid epidemics killed 890,000 people in 1919 and just
over one million in 1920; there were also innumerable deaths from dysentery and
cholera as well as hunger and starvation. The total number of deaths which can
be attributed to the Civil War was between seven and ten million - more than
four times the number of Russian deaths in the First World War (1.7 million);
seven million children were left homeless, and a further one million people are
thought to have emigrated during the war. These included tens of thousands of
right-wing political opponents of the communists and huge numbers of intellec
tuals, professionals, scientists and engineers. This was one of the reasons why
there was a chronic shortage of such qualified people in the USSR during the
inter-war years. ‘The Civil War unleashed by Lenin’s revolution,’ concludes
Mawdsley, ‘was the greatest national catastrophe Europe had yet seen.’29
The war left the economy in a state of collapse; half the labour force of Moscow
and Petrograd (see Document E) had fled into the countryside in search of food,
and the industrial centres of the Donbas, the Ukraine and the Urals had suffered
heavy damage. Thus the class which had been the Bolsheviks’ strongest support
ers in 1917 was rapidly disappearing. To cope with its cash shortage the govern
ment had simply printed more banknotes to meet its immediate expenses; by
October 1920 the rouble was worth only one per cent of its value in October 1917.

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been given their independ
ence, so it was only to be expected that production in all areas of the economy
would be well down on the pre-World War levels. However, output was not just
lower - it was catastrophically lower, as these statistics provided by Alec Nove
show:30
1913 1921
Factory production (million roubles) 10,251 2004
Coal (million tons) 29.0 8.9
Electricity (million kWhs) 1945 520
Pig iron (thousand tons) 4216 116
Steel (thousand tons) 4231 183
Cotton fabrics (million metres) 2582 105
Grain harvest (million tons) 80.1 37.6
Rail freight carried (million tons) 132.4 39.4
Exports (million roubles) 1520 20
The area which has interested historians most is the extent to which the
Bolshevik regime was affected by the Civil War. Many changes took place in the
nature and policies of the regime in both the political and economic spheres.
Politically the regime became militarized and brutalized; economically it became
centralized, and state control was extended over all areas of the economy. The
question is: was the regime forced into these changes by the crisis of the Civil War,
or would they have taken place anyway because of the nature, of communism, as
a deliberate drive towards socialism? If the second alternative is the correct one,
did the government try to blame the changes on the crisis situation once they
were seen to be ultimately failing?
American historian Robert C. Tucker argues that the Civil War was responsible
for the political developments. 'War Communism militarized the revolutionary
political culture of the Bolshevik movement. The heritage of that formative time
in the Soviet culture's history was martial zeal, readiness to resort to coercion,
centralized administration and summary justice.’ It brutalized the party and
gave them a siege mentality which they found it difficult to break away from; and
it made centralization, strict discipline and mobilization of the population in order
to achieve the regime’s targets an integral part of the system. Tucker believes that
already at the height of the Civil War there were signs of Lenin’s later, more ‘civil
ized’ NEP thinking. For example in May 1919 Lenin wrote: ‘the dictatorship of the
proletariat is not only the use of force against the exploiters, and not even mainly
the use of force.’ Lenin was convinced that the main obstacle to socialism was
the culture of backwardness left over from centuries of the tsarist regime, which
was so deeply ingrained in the mentality of the population; the best way to
change this was not by forcible means but by education, and that would take
along time.31 Already in March 1919 the party had adopted a new programme
which aimed to raise ‘the low cultural level of the masses’ as a vital preliminary to
‘the abolition of state authority.' One of the key clauses in Lenin’s April Theses
was that the army should be abolished and replaced by a democratic militia in
which everybody would have a chance to serve. This would guarantee that it
i \
coukl not be used against the people, since the people would hardly choose to
attack themselves. However, the growing military threat to the new government
arguably forced it to abandon such utopian hopes and return to more traditional
military thinking.
Other historians believe that although the Civil War was one of the influences
which militarized the Soviet system, it was by no means the only one. Christo
pher Read makes the point that the Bolshevik leaders were products of the tsarist
environment, which was itself extremely authoritarian and did all it could to
stifle criticism and opposition. The revolutionaries had been brought up under
this system and had suffered at its hands. Tn the prevailing circumstances,'
claims Read, 'it is hard to see why opposition should be tolerated when the
Russian tradition was to eradicate it as heresy.' Even without the Civil War then,
the Bolsheviks would have resorted to strong-arm methods because they were
a minority party, which, in the eyes of the strict Marxists, had seized power too
soon. They saw themselves as teachers and guides of the masses, knowing what
the people wanted better than the people did themselves. Inevitably many of the
masses were reluctant to accept this leadership and withdrew their support and
co-operation. Whenever a minority party tries to force its will on the majority,
coercion is more or less inevitable. In the case of the Bolsheviks, ‘where consent
was lacking, force, in varying degrees, filled the gap.’32
Among the older generation of liberal historians, Adam Ulam claims that
Lenin fully expected civil war to break out and even welcomed it because it gave
him the justification to continue with the violence, the terror, the suppression of
an independent press, the persecution of opposition within the party and all the
other elements that went to make up War Communism. When the Civil War
was over he used other crises - the famine in the Volga area in 1920-21 and the
Kronstadt uprising in 1921 - as excuses to prolong the ‘state of siege'. ‘How can
one allow the luxury of free political discussion, he would ask, when there are
two million Russian refugees abroad? Or when the capitalists have not desisted
from their plans to overthrow the Soviets?’33
There is the same debate about the main economic features of War Commun
ism - nationalization and state control of the whole economy: would they have
been introduced with or without the Civil War because they were central to
Bolshevik aims and ideals, or were they forced on the government by the need to
gear the economy totally to the war effort? Even Soviet historians differ in their
interpretations; A. Venediktov, writing in 1957, believed that the party did have
a basic plan for nationalizing all the major branches of industry as soon as pos
sible. The Sixth Party Congress (July-August 1917) passed a resolution to this
effect, and Lenin had already said in his April Theses that they must ‘bring pro
duction and distribution under the control of the Soviets.' In December 1917
Lenin said that he intended to declare all limited companies to be state property
and on 15 December he set up the Supreme Council of National Economy
(known as Vesenkha or VSNKh). Its function was ‘the organization of the
national economy and state finance... and to plan for regulating the economic
life of the country - food supply, trade and industry, agriculture, finance, army
and navy; also activities of factory and trade union working class organizations.’
It had the power to issue orders on all economic matters, which were binding on

everybody, including the commissars. On 17 January 1918 the government
announced that its policies were designed ‘to guarantee the power of the working
people over the exploiters, and as a first step towards the complete conversion of
the factories, mines, railways and other means of production and transport into
the property of the workers' and peasants’ state.’
All this seems a very clear statement of intent, and some steps had been taken
to carry it into practice before the Civil War proper began. Banks were nationalized,
the state monopoly on grain introduced and the railways and merchant fleet
placed under government control. By June 1918, 487 large factories had been
nationalized. However, some other Soviet historians feel that Venediktov's
evidence is not convincing. F. Samokhvalov, writing in 1964, feels that Lenin
intended to develop a mixed economy in which some capitalist activity would be
allowed. He pointed out that the wording of the official documents setting up
VSNKh was vague: at no pointwas the word ‘nationalization’ used, nor was any
timetable mentioned. The 487 nationalized factories were only a minute pro
portion of the total - when War Communism eventually took off fully, 37,000
enterprises employing 1.5 million workers had been nationalized by 1920. The
interesting point is that over two-thirds of those first 487 nationalizations were
carried out not on the orders of the government, but by local Soviets. In fact the
government was alarmed by the large numbers of unauthorised nationalizations
taking place and actually ordered that no more should be undertaken without
permission from VSNKh. This hardly suggests that all-round nationalization was
an immediate aim when VSNKh was set up. The Bolsheviks themselves were
divided on the issue: some, including Nikolai Bukharin, were horrified by War
Communism because they believed that small-scale trade and agriculture
should remain in private hands. Others fully approved of it and saw nationaliza
tion as their main socialist goal. For them the difficulties of the Civil War were
an excuse to introduce full state control. Alec Nove concludes that ‘Lenin and
his colleagues were playing it by ear... we must allow for the interaction of
Bolshevik ideas with the desperate situation in which they found themselves.’
In a sense therefore War Communism was both a response to the war emergency
and an attempt to leap into full socialism.34
5.6 The New Economic Policy (NEP)

(a) The shift to the New Economic Policy
In 1921 Lenin suddenly introduced a dramatic change in the government’s
economic policies, ending grain requisitioning from the peasants and allowing
small-scale manufacturing and trade to be returned to private ownership. Again
there is much debate about Lenin’s motives: was the NEP forced on him by
difficult circumstances - the Kronstadt mutiny and various other crises - or had
he intended to introduce it anyway once the Civil War was over? Some Bolsheviks
claimed that they had been on the point of starting it when the Civil War pre
vented them. If this is true then NEP was intended to be a permanent policy; but
at the time of its introduction most Bolsheviks saw it as a temporary retreat from

real socialism. But how long was temporary? Even Lenin himself made contra
dictory statements about this at different times.
There is no doubt that early in 1921 Russia was still in crisis, despite the ending
of the war. War Communism was extremely unpopular with the peasants who
felt that they had no incentive to produce as much grain as possible; they were
quite content to grow just enough for their own needs, and so production fell
sharply. In 1921 the peasants sowed only about half the area sowed in 1913 and
the harvest was less than half the 1913 total. In 1921-22 Russia experienced the
worst famine ever in its history - probably about five million people died from
starvation and disease, and there were reports of cannibalism and body-snatching.
The government was forced to appeal to the outside world for help, and many
organizations responded, including the international Quakers and Herbert
Hoover's American aid project (see Document F(iii)). There was a wave of
peasant revolts across most of European Russia; now that the Whites had been
defeated there was no need for the peasants to continue supporting the commu
nists as the lesser of two evils. By March 1921 the government had virtually lost
control of rural Russia; large armies of rebel peasants led mainly by Left SRs
roamed the countryside raiding grain-collecting stations and carrying the requi
sitioned grain back to the villages. Almost all the new collective farms were
destroyed and their livestock shared out among local peasants. Some of the rebel
leaders had been Bolshevik supporters during the Civil War but had now had
enough of the Bolshevik dictatorship. Terrible revenge was taken against govern
ment officials, commissars and members of the grain brigades - thousands of
Bolsheviks were tortured and murdered; the classic symbolic torture was to slice
open stomachs and stuff them with wheat (see Document F(ii)). The growing dis
affection with the regime was reflected in the increasing numbers of Mensheviks
and SRs elected to rural Soviets.
The government was unpopular in the cities too. Food was in short supply and
extremely expensive. Unusually heavy snow disrupted transport throughout
January 1921 and hundreds of factories were forced to close through lack of fuel.
In February 1921 the appalling conditions brought the workers of Moscow to
breaking point, and thousands came out on strike. There were massive demon
strations calling for free trade and the recall of the Constituent Assembly. The
strikes soon spread to Petrograd where similar demands were made - freedom of
speech and the press, an end to the police terror, and free elections for factory
committees, trade unions and Soviets. Martial law was declared in both cities
and the Cheka arrested hundreds of strikers as well as many Mensheviks and SRs
who were said to be playing a leading role in the demonstrations. This only
inflamed the situation further and the government was not confident that it
could rely on the army to restore order if called upon.
There were disagreements within the communist party leadership as to how
best to proceed. Trotsky felt that the fate of the Revolution was delicately
balanced and he suggested that the workers needed stricter discipline to get
the economy moving again. He demanded that trade unions should be put in
their places - that is, strictly subordinated to the state. This outraged some of
the other leading Bolsheviks who felt strongly that trade unions should remain
independent and were horrified at the prospect of ‘military discipline’ for

workers. This group, the so-called ‘Workers’ Opposition', was led by Alexander
Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, who wanted power to be shared
between the party, the trade unions and the Soviets. In the end Lenin acted as
a peacemaker - both Trotsky and the trade union supporters had to acknow
ledge defeat and accept Lenin’s middle way policy. Unfortunately this pre
occupation with the ‘trade union problem’ delayed proper discussion of the
food crisis, and by the end of February 1921 there was a serious threat that the
unrest would bring down the regime. The situation was strikingly similar to
the one which had led to the overthrow of the monarchy exactly four years
earlier. It was the mutiny of the Kronstadt naval garrison which brought mat
ters to a head.
(b) The Kronstadt Mutiny, February-March 1921

As the news of the strikes in Petrograd reached the island naval base, the garrison
of around 15,000 soldiers and sailors became increasingly restless. They were
mainly peasants from rural village backgrounds and they were well-informed
about the hardships suffered by their families - the continuation of grain requisi
tioning even though the Civil War was over, the brutality of the grain detachments
and the complete insensitivity of many of the commissars. Already they had
complained about the corruption and special privileges of the Bolshevik elite and
they bitterly resented the dictatorial attitude of the party. In 1917 the Kronstadt
garrison had been the most dedicated Bolshevik supporters, but by the end of
January party membership on the island had fallen by half and the party itself
was being denounced as ‘an enemy of the people’.
On 28 February a meeting on board the battleship Petropavlovsk passed a
resolution calling for free elections for the Soviets by secret ballot, freedom of
speech and the press for peasants, workers, soldiers and the left wing parties (but
not for ‘the bourgeois and the landlords’), freedom of meetings for peasant asso
ciations and trade unions, abolition of grain requisitioning and the righfof peas
ants to cultivate their land as they saw fit, provided they did not employ hired
labour. The resolution was almost unanimously approved at a huge open-air
meeting the following day attended by around 16,000 people, which included
soldiers, sailors and a fair proportion of the 30,000 civilian inhabitants of
Kronstadt. There was no hint of counter-revolution in their demands - they had
simply had enough of the communist one-party dictatorship. They did not want
the Constituent Assembly; what they wanted was genuine Soviet democracy of
all the working class parties, a return to democratically elected soldiers’, sailors'
and factory committees and the release of all workers from the Cheka prisons.
They took no aggressive action and waited, apparently hoping that the rest of the
country and the army would rally to their support; perhaps too they were hoping
that the government would negotiate.
However, to make any major political concessions would be the beginning of
the end of the one-party dictatorship. The leadership saw the Kronstadt programme
simply as an attack on Bolshevik power, and had no hesitation in deciding that
the mutineers must be crushed, before they were joined by the Petrograd strikers
and the rest of the country. Lenin and Trotsky announced that the rising was

being organized by ‘White Guards’ and claimed that the sailors were not the
same as the staunch Bolshevik supporters of 1917 - they were young recruits who
were bringing ‘anarchist* and ‘petty-bourgeois’ attitudes with them from their
villages. Both claims were untrue. Efforts were now made to appease the workers
of Petrograd. Zinoviev, the communist leader in the city, increased the daily food
ration (though this depleted the rapidly dwindling reserves) and dropped hints
that the government was preparing to abandon the hated grain requisitioning.
On 1 March he ordered the removal of the road blocks set up around Petrograd to
prevent private trade, and these gestures did something to defuse the situation in
Petrograd itself.
Pressure could now be brought to bear on Kronstadt. Trotsky was sent to
Petrograd to take charge of operations and on 5 March he ordered the muti
neers to surrender immediately or they would be ‘shot like partridges'. The
mutineers rejected this ultimatum and Trotsky ordered the Red Army to attack
Kronstadt. On 8 March, after a long artillery bombardment, the troops set out
on the five-mile march across the ice. They soon came under heavy machine-
gun fire; many ran away, about a thousand joined the mutineers, two thousand
were killed and the attack ended in fiasco. A week later General Tukhachevsky
had assembled a larger and more reliable force of 50,000 men consisting of
Cheka troops and elite communist regiments known as Units of Special Desig
nation. A second assault was launched on Kronstadt using different tactics - the
troops crossed the ice at night and succeeded in getting close to the island
before they were spotted. By the morning of 18 March, after vicious house-to-
house fighting which brought heavy losses on both sides (about 10,000 of the
communist troops were killed), the communists had regained control of
Kronstadt. About 8000 of the rebel garrison troops escaped across the ice to Fin
land, but those who were taken prisoner could expect no mercy. Zinoviev
ordered the immediate execution of 500 leading mutineers, and almost 2000
more were executed later, most of them without trial. Lenin ordered hundreds
of other prisoners to be sent to a concentration camp in the far north, on an
island in the White Sea; here conditions were so bad that very few of them
returned. The American anarchist Alexander Berkman, who was in Petrograd at
the time, wrote in his diary: ‘My heart is numb with despair; something has died
within m e ... the last thread of faith in the Bolsheviks is broken.’35 The ruthless
suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny stunned socialists the world over (see
Document D(iii)). It was now clear beyond all shadow of doubt that the Bolshe
viks were not interested in listening to the political arguments of the ordinary
people of Russia. In the words of Israel Getzler, ‘the sailors, soldiers and workers
of Red Kronstadt had enthusiastically enlisted in the front ranks of the October
revolution and in the civil war, trusting that Soviet power would make the whole
of Russia into one large Soviet democracy like their Kronstadt. Now it was they
who found themselves in brutal confrontation with a Bolshevik power which
had snuffed out their dream of egalitarian democracy.'36 Before long the same
brute force had successfully crushed the peasant revolts in Tambov, where
15,000 rebels were shot, and in Siberia, the Don and the Kuban. The Mensheviks
and SRs were suppressed and as many as 5000 Mensheviks arrested during the
course of 1921.

(c) The Tenth Party Congress and the beginning of NEP
The Congïess opened in Moscow on 8 March 1921 at the height of the Kronstadt
mutiny. The first few days were taken up by debates about the role of the trade
unions and party unity. It wasn’t until 14 March that Lenin eventually announced
the proposal to replace grain requisitioning with a tax in kind; in other words
peasants would hand over a fixed amount of grain and would then, presumably,
be free to sell the rest privately. Although none of the Bolshevik leaders was
enthusiastic about the new policy, which was seen as a betrayal of socialism,
Lenin was able to persuade them that it was the only way to win the co-operation
of the peasants. The Congress approved this change as well as the proposal to
grant concessions to foreign capitalists to set up factories in Russia.
On the surface it might look as though the strikes and the Kronstadt mutiny
forced Lenin into economic retreat. But recent biographers have shown that he
may well have changed his mind as early as November 1920 after visiting the
village of Yaropolets near Moscow and talking to peasants about their difficulties.
He paid other visits to villages in December and talked to peasants at the Con
gress of Soviets held in December 1920. If he still needed convincing, his meeting
on 2 February 1921 with V.N. Sokolov, a Bolshevik representative from Siberia,
perhaps did the trick: he reported on the peasant unrest and disturbances in his
area and told Lenin that some urgent action was needed to pacify the peasants;
otherwise there could be a catastrophe. The same day Bukharin brought news of
another peasant uprising - in Tambov province. When the Politburo met on 8
February Lenin sketched out his first proposals for the reversal of policy. The aim
of the new tax in kind was ‘to expand the freedom of the cultivator to use his
surpluses over and above the tax in local economic exchange... and to reward
those who increase their output.’37As yet, however, the proposed change was not
made public - it would take time to persuade the rest of the party that, given the
huge scale of opposition to them, some drastic action was urgently needed. The
importance of Kronstadt was not that it changed Lenin’s mind, but th^t it gave
him the weapon with which to overcome the opposition and win over the Party
Congress.
Although Lenin was prepared to allow some relaxation of economic control,
the opposite was true in the political sphere. In the weeks leading up to the Con
gress he had become increasingly impatient with the disputes and arguments
going on within the communist party. In his 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done?
Lenin laid great emphasis on party discipline, and most Bolsheviks had accepted
the idea of democratic centralism - that is, members were free to debate issues, but
once an issue had been voted on at a Congress or a Central Committee meeting,
they were bound to accept that decision as final. Since the party took power in
1917 a tendency had developed for factions to continue pressing their point of
view even after a decision had been taken against them. Alexander Shlyapnikov
and the Workers’ Opposition for example, who believed that the workers were
not receiving the benefits they deserved from the revolution, were continually
trying to whip up support for their programme of more power to the trade unions.
The factions acted almost like separate political parties within the communist
party; this was a healthy sign in the sense that it enabled genuine discussion of
158 Mastering Twentieth-Century Auçsian History

many important issues to take place. But Lenin thought otherwise - at a time
when the Bolsheviks’ popularity was at its lowest ebb since 1917, divisions in the
party were a luxury they simply could not afford; at this time of economic and
political crisis they were an open encouragement to the enemies of the regime.
The Tenth Party Congress therefore passed Lenin’s resolution ‘On party unity'
which banned factions within the party and allowed the leadership to expel any
member who persisted in opposing a policy once it had been adopted as official.
It seemed that the one-party dictatorship with Lenin as the dictator was now
complete.
(d) The NEP in operation

The introduction of NEP was a great victory for the peasants; the government
expressed its regret that grain requisitioning had been forced upon them by the
Civil War. The first payments of grain and other agricultural products were set at
a considerably lower level than under War Communism. Peasants were allowed
to sell their surplus produce privately; it was hoped that this would encourage
them to produce as much as possible and thus alleviate the food shortages. After
1923 they were allowed to pay the tax in cash. At first private trade was restricted
to local markets and fairs, but before long middlemen were allowed to trade so
that the surplus grain could be brought to the towns where it was most needed.
Many of these private traders, who were soon known as ‘Nepmen’, flourished
and became quite wealthy. Small private shops were allowed to open again. The
government promised to buy manufactured goods from abroad so that there
would be something worthwhile for the peasants to spend their profits on. As
soon as the beneficial effects of the new policy were felt, the relaxation of control
began to spread to industry. The goal of complete nationalization was aban
doned and about 80 per cent of small-scale industry had been restored to private
ownership by 1923. However, Lenin insisted that most heavy industry - what he
called ‘the commanding heights of the economy' - including the railways and
banking should remain under state control, which meant that around 84 per cent
of all industrial workers were employed in state-owned enterprises. The economy
was an odd mixture in which one section - heavy industry - was totally dom
inated by the state, while the other section - agriculture - was controlled by some
25 million independent small producers. Many of the Bolshevik leaders felt
highly aggrieved at this return of capitalist activities and Lenin had a very rough
ride at the Party Conference in May 1921. Other aspects of NEP included foreign
investment to help develop Russian factories and mines, and attempts to stabilize
the currency by cutting government spending. This resulted in the introduction
of charges for schooling and health care, which had been free, and contributory
old-age pensions.
Lenin defended the NEP vigorously. It would be a great crime, he argued, not
to admit that they had made mistakes in dealing with the peasants; ‘only agree
ment with the peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia... the needs
of the middle peasants must be satisfied... we must adapt our state economy to
the economy of the middle peasant.’ He told the Eleventh Party Congress in 1922
that the communists had failed to run the economy successfully; therefore they

must make use of the experience of the capitalists. ‘The capitalist is the possessor
of the seqret to make the economy bloom; they are operating like robbers; they
make profit; but they know how to do things... The mixed companies that we
have begun to form, in which private capitalists, Russian and foreign, and Com
munists participate, provide one of the means by which we can learn to organize
properly, so that we can help the peasant make progress. Communists must
learn from ordinary capitalists.’38
On the question of how long it was intended to continue NEP, it is difficult to
be certain. At first the impression given was that it was only temporary; accord
ing to Bukharin: ‘we are making economic concessions in order to avoid political
ones. The NEP is only á temporary deviation, a tactical retreat, a clearing of the
land for a new and decisive attack of labour against the front of international
capitalism.’ Lenin himself compared it with the Japanese attack on Port Arthur
during the Russo-Japanese War: the first attack had failed, so then the Japanese
halted, retreated for some distance and rethought their strategy; later on a second
attack was launched but with more careful preparation, and this time it suc
ceeded. The lesson to be drawn was that some failures were necessary in order to
find the best method. About the length of time involved, Lenin was vague - in
May 1921 he told the party that NEP must be pursued ‘seriously and for a long
time - not less than a decade and probably more... we must definitely get this
into our heads and remember it well, because rumours are spreading that this
is... a form of political trickery that is only being carried out for the moment.
This is not true.’ In October 1921, when asked when NEP would be halted he
replied: ‘This question is incorrectly posed because only the further implementa
tion of our turnabout can give an answer to it. We shall retreat until we have
learned for ourselves, until we have prepared ourselves to go over into a solid
attack.’
At other times Lenin seemed to be suggesting that the NEP was not a retreat - it
was a return to something like the correct road to socialism along which they had
scarcely begun to advance before the Civil War distracted them. HeNadmitted
that by taking power in 1917 the Bolsheviks had prevented the bourgeois revolu
tion from running its course; so instead of introducing socialism immediately
in a country dominated by a large industrial proletariat, it had to be developed
more gradually in a backward peasant-dominated society. NEP was not a retreat -
it was an attempt to find an alternative road to socialism in less than ideal
circumstances.39
The dissenting Soviet historian Roy A. Medvedev, writing in 1971, argued that
judging by Lenin's last thoughts on the economy which were expressed in arti
cles which he dictated, and in conversations with Bukharin in 1923 after he had
suffered two strokes, he envisaged NEP as consisting of two stages. In the first
stage the plan was to increase agricultural production as much as possible using
the existing system of small peasant farms by giving all possible help to poor and
middle peasants. He did not see the kulaks as a threat to socialism during this
first stage and even proposed giving prizes to kulaks for increased production.
But he did believe that in the long run the kulaks were the enemies of socialism
and of the Soviet regime, and so it would be wrong to make the future of Russian
agriculture dependent on them. The second stage of NEP therefore was the
i '
development of agrarian co-operatives which would lead to the triumph of
socialism. He acknowledged that this would not be easy and would involve a long
campaign stretching over many years to develop literacy and general culture
among the peasants. They would have to be taught how to work together and
how to use agricultural machinery and tractors, and they would have to be con
vinced of the benefits of a co-operative system of farming in terms of efficiency,
productivity and profit. In an article written in January 1923 Lenin explained
that ‘to achieve through NEP the participation of the entire population in the
co-operative movement requires an entire historical epoch. We may get through
this epoch successfully in one or two decades’ (see Document H).
There were no precise details given; clearly at this stage it was all experimental,
and the details would be worked out from actual experience. As Lenin remarked
to H.G. Wells: ‘Those who are engaged in the formidable task of overcoming
capitalism must be prepared to try method after method until they find the one
which answers their purpose best.’40 One thing was very clear, however, at least
according to Bukharin - Lenin had turned his back on the use of force and was
anxious to rely on peaceful methods; it was to be communism with a human
face. Some later historians have questioned the reliability of Bukharin's claims
which he made in the late 1920s when he had fallen out with Stalin over whether
or not to continue the NEP. Stalin wanted to abandon it and introduce a tougher
policy towards the kulaks, whereas Bukharin was keen to continue without the
use of force. Obviously it was to Bukharin’s advantage if he could show that
Lenin too was in favour of an evolutionary and peaceful approach.
(e) How successful was the New Economic Policy?

The NEP continued until the spring of 1928 when it was abruptly abandoned on
the orders of Stalin. Judging from the statistics, the policy seems to have been
reasonably successful and by 1926 the government could claim with some justi
fication that it had achieved its immediate aim. Production in all sections of the
economy had improved significantly and in most commodities it was not far off
the 1913 levels. Given the territorial losses at the end of World War One and the
war with Poland, this was a considerable achievement.41
1913 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926

Industrial output 10,251 2004 2619 4005 4660 7739 11,083
(million roubles)
Coal (million tons) 29.0 8.9 9.5 13.7 16.1 18.1 27.6
Electricity (million kWhs) 1945 520 775 1146 1562 2925 3508
Pig iron (thousand tons) 4216 116 188 309 755 1535 2441
Steel (thousand tons) 4231 183 392 709 1140 2135 3141
Cotton fabrics 2582 105 349 691 963 1688 2286
(million metres)
Sown area 105.0 90.3 77.7 91.7 98.1 104. 110.3
(million hectares) 3
Grain harvest 80.1 37.6 50.3 56.6 51.4 72.5 76.8
(million tons)

Especially impressive were the sown area which was slightly greater than in 1913,
and the electricity output which almost doubled. This was one of Lenin’s favourite
schemes; in December 1921 he wrote in his report to the Congress of Soviets:
‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification Of the whole country.
Otherwise the country will remain a small peasant country... Only when the
country has been electrified, and industry, agriculture and transport have been
placed on the technical basis of modem large-scale industry, only then shall we
be fully victorious.’42
One can never be quite sure how reliable statistics are; the problem with these
particular statisdcs is that they are mainly from Soviet sources and so could have
been exaggerated to make the communists’ achievement appear better than it
really was. On the other hand the 1913 statistics are from official tsarist sources,
so they too could have been inflated. Although they give the impression of a fairly
steady improvement, the sources conceal many problems. The dreadful famine
continued into 1922, partly because of transport problems. The railways were in
a bad way - at least half the locomotives had broken down and it was difficult to
get hold of spare parts. The government solved this problem by importing
locomotives and parts, though they had to spend precious foreign currency to
pay for them. In the long run this paid off, and in 1926-27 the amount of rail
traffic surpassed the 1913 figure.
There were also serious industrial problems because the government insisted
that under the NEP heavy industry must produce commercially. This meant that
it must do without the state subsidies which it had been receiving since 1917, and
it must make a profit - or at least avoid making a loss. Factories tried to cut
expenses by reducing their workforces, and so unemployment rose rapidly. The
country experienced a problem with inflation which caused its currency to
dwindle dramatically in value; by 1922 the rouble was worth 60,000 times less
than it had been in 1913. In rural areas money went out of use and its place was
taken by a barter economy. Sometimes poods (a pood was approximately 36
pounds) of grain were used as a unit of exchange. Lenin was determined that the
country must have a stable currency, but this could only be achieved by balan
cing the budget. Somehow the government had to increase its income, and that
meant imposing more taxes and higher taxes: the grain tax was changed to a cash
payment, and taxes were introduced on income and property, and on private
businesses and workshops. People were encouraged to buy government bonds,
and sometimes the ‘encouragement’ was little short of coercion. The situation
was helped by the communists’ repudiation of millions of roubles worth of
foreign debts and interest payments incurred by the Tsarist government before
1917. A new Soviet bank was set up in October 1921 which worked so well that
the government succeeded in balancing the budget in the financial year 1923-24.
In February 1924 the newly stabilized rouble became the sole official currency
and then in the following financial year the government had a surplus for the first
time since 1917.
But before that was achieved there was another problem to be faced - this
was the strange situation in which industrial and agricultural prices moved
rapidly in opposite directions. It was Trotsky who nicknamed it the ‘scissors
crisis’: the scissors of the econpmy were opened as the blades of industrial and

agricultural prices moved apart - industrial prices rose substantially while
agricultural prices fell. In October 1923 industrial prices stood at 276 per cent
of their 1913 level, whereas agricultural prices had fallen to only 89 per cent of
their 1913 level. There were a number or reasons for this: agriculture recovered
rapidly, no doubt because of the greater incentives to produce more; by 1923
the sown area was back to 90 per cent of the 1913 total, there was a good
harvest, food shortages were no longer a major problem, and so prices fell.
However, industry, short of equipment and supplies of raw materials, recov
ered far more slowly; for example in 1923 output of textiles was still only about
a quarter of the pre-war figure, and iron and steel output was even lower than
that, which tended to push industrial prices up. The peasants suffered most
from this: although their incomes had increased, the government was still the
main buyer of grain, in spite of the activities of the private traders, and the gov
ernment always paid the lowest prices it could get away with. The peasants
reacted as they always did in these circumstances - they stopped releasing their
grain; they were the main buyers of manufactured goods, but now they could
not afford to buy as much as they would have liked. Eventually the scissors
crisis partially solved itself: the lack of peasant spending power meant that
state-owned industry had difficulty selling its consumer goods and machinery,
and so prices began to fall, encouraged by the government which did its best
to bring prices down. By mid-1924 the blades of the scissors had closed
appreciably.
To sum up, economic progress under the NEP was modest but it was such
a marked improvement on what had happened in the years before it was intro
duced that it was widely accepted up until 1927. By then industrial workers
who had a job were being paid real wages on a level with pre-war values and
they had the benefits of new social legislation brought in under the NEP. They
were entitled to an eight-hour working day, two weeks' holiday with pay, sick
pay, unemployment pay and health care. As for the peasants, it seems likely
that they too were better off; statistics suggest that the percentage of the
harvest leaving the countryside fell between 1913 and 1927, which is taken by
some historians to mean that peasants and their livestock were eating more;
the peasant standard of living was probably far higher than in 1913. The fact
that hardly any peasant protests took place in the mid-1920s seems to bear out
this view.43 Electricity came to many villages along with hospitals, schools,
libraries and cinemas. On some of the larger peasant farms advanced methods
were being used - multi-field crop rotation was introduced on around 20 per
cent of all farmed land, along with chemical fertilizers and modern machinery.
Unfortunately, however, the NEP had some major weaknesses: it led to high
unemployment - by 1923 about 16 per cent of the industrial workforce had
been made redundant as factories tried to cut costs; and in 1927 unemploy
ment was still at the same level. Industry needed new plant and new machinery
and therefore massive new investment which the NEP was not providing
(see Document I). And NEP meant that the urban areas were still dependent on
privately-owned agriculture for their basic food supplies. Given the fact that
grain marketings remained well below pre-war levels, this was bound to cause
the government serious concern.

5.7 Foreign affairs and the Communist
International
(a) The Bolsheviks and world revolution
Lenin and Trotsky attached vital importance to the theory of ‘permanent revolu
tion'. Since in the eyes of the strict Marxists, the proletarian revolution had taken
place in Russia too early, before the country was sufficiently industrialized, it was
crucial that the Bolshevik revolution should spark off revolutions in more
advanced countries like Germany. They genuinely believed that Germany was
the most likely candidate for the next revolution because her people were weary
of the war and her armies were in retreat in the west in October 1918. Their theory
was that when dictatorships of the proletariat were established in advanced
states like Germany, they would give their Russian comrades all the economic
and political support they needed. There was a rising of left-wing socialists
known as Spartakists in Berlin in January 1919, but it was soon suppressed. More
promising for the Bolsheviks was an uprising in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, in
March 1919 - a Soviet republic was declared but it collapsed after only two
months. The nearest thing to a successful revolution outside Russia occurred in
Hungary, where in March 1919, Bela Kun set up a Soviet republic in Budapest.
Again, however, it was short-lived - it lasted only until August when Kun was
overthrown and forced to flee, eventually settling in Russia.
In order to encourage world revolution Lenin called together representatives
from communist parties all over the world in a Congress in Moscow in March 1919.
It was known as the Third International or the Comintern; Lenin was hoping to use
it to organize the world's communists under Russian leadership, showing them
how to provoke strikes and insurrections. The chairman was Zinoviev who confi
dently predicted that ‘in a year the whole of Europe will be Communist.' Comin
tern agents were active in most European countries during the next few years,
doing their best to ‘export the revolution'. They had very little success: by the time
the next Comintern Congress met in the summer of 1920, the revolutionary tide in
Europe had clearly ebbed. The Russian invasion of Poland in July 1920 was the last
desperate attempt to provoke revolution and it ended in failure (see section 5.5(b)).
The Bolsheviks had to accept at last that their dreams of world revolution were not
going to be realized. At its 1921 Congress the Comintern adopted new tactics - the
goal now was to form a United Workers’ Front in which the world’s communist
parties pledged themselves to work with other socialist parties and trade unions for
common aims. This was a major climb-down from its original strategy, although it
did not entirely abandon its subversive activity. Comintern agents were involved in
an attempted rising in Germany in 1923 which was a failure. Foreign governments
assumed that its activities were sponsored by the Soviet government and this made
it more difficult for Russia to regain the trust of the great powers.
(b) Communist Russia and the W est

The realization that Russia was in danger of being isolated for the foreseeable
future brought about a radical change in communist foreign policy. Lenin took

the humiliating lesson of defeat by the Poles to heart, and at the Third Comintern
Congress in June 1921 he denounced any further attempts at armed uprising. He
acknowledged that Russia needed peaceful co-existence and co-operation in the
form of trade with, and investment from the capitalist world. Britain was one of
the first countries to resume diplomatic relations with Russia, and in March 1921
the two countries signed an agreement in which Britain promised to begin trading
again. Later in 1921 the Russians agreed to pay back some of the loans which
the Tsarist government had accepted before 1917. In April 1922 the Russians
attended an international conference in Genoa, along with the British, French,
Italians and Germans. This in itself was a significant step, showing that commun
ist Russia was being accepted as an equal among the other European states. But
they all had their own ulterior motives: Britain hoped to persuade the Russians to
repay all their debts in full, and to manoeuvre the French into reducing their
reparations demands from Germany. Germany was hoping that some of the
harshest terms of the 1919 Versailles Peace Settlement would be toned down;
and the Russians hoped to attract investment and aid from the West in order to
revive their economy.
The Russian delegation was led by Georgi Chicherin, the Commissar for
Foreign Affairs, but he had strict instructions from Lenin not to reach any general
agreement with all the powers - Lenin felt that Russia's interests would best be
served if the other European states remained divided; once they were united and
in full agreement, they might well turn against Russia. Lenin had also decided
that Russia would refuse to pay all her outstanding debts, and he was suspicious
that any deal with Britain or France over trade or investment would have strings
attached which would enable them to interfere in Russian economic affairs. Not
surprisingly the conference failed: the French were unco-operative on the ques
tion of reducing German reparations, and the British and French would not do
a deal on Russia's terms. However, the Russian and German delegations with
drew from the conference and met at Rapallo about 20 miles further along the
coast. A treaty was signed in which the two defeated black-sheep states of Europe
promised to cancel their mutual debts; Russia would supply Germany with grain
in return for machinery, and Russia was to allow German pilots to train in her
territory (the Versailles Treaty forbade them to train in Germany). This agree
ment was something of a triumph for the communist government - Russia was
no longer completely isolated and the economic co-operation with Germany was
valuable. In 1924 the First Labour government in Britain gave official recognition
to what was now the USSR.
Meanwhile, at the same time as the Moscow government was trying to
improve relations with individual Western states, the Comintern, despite its 1921
declaration, could not resist interfering. When there was an economic crisis in
Germany in 1923, the Soviet government backed a Comintern plan to help Ger
man communists to seize power. The attempt went badly wrong and the com
munists were crushingly defeated. Although the German government continued
to co-operate with Russia under the terms of the Rapallo Treaty, they were now
beginning to feel that there was more to be gained from closer ties with the West,
rather than from the USSR. Similarly Britain became more suspicious of Russian
interference; just before the election of October 1924 The Daily Mail published

a letter signed by Zinoviev which, it was claimed, he had written to the British
Communist Party giving instructions about forming cells in the British army as
a step towards revolution. Although it was a fake, the letter helped to turn British
public opinion against the USSR, and may well have contributed to the Labour
government's defeat in the next election. During the British General Strike of
1926 the Russians encouraged the strikers and at the same time Comintern
agents were trying to stir up trouble for the British in India. In 1927 the British
Conservative government broke off diplomatic relations with the USSR. These
apparently contradictory foreign policies on the part of the Moscow government
left the USSR almost isolated again. Stalin in particular among the Russian
leaders was worried at the increasing co-operation between the Western powers
(the 1924 Dawes Plan and the 1925 Locarno Treaties - see section 7.1(a)), which
he felt boded ill for Russia.
5.8 Russia, government, nationalities and

the 1922 constitution
(a) The nationalities and the Bolsheviks
In 1917 only just over half the population - the people in the central core of the
empire - was Russian; around the peripheries there was a bewildering variety of
different national minorities. To the north there were the Finns, around the
Baltic there were Germans, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, in the west
there were Poles, Belorussians and Ukrainians, and in Transcaucasia (the area
between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea) there were Armenians, Azerbaijanis,
Georgians, Chechens and Dagestanis. In the east, where most of the people were
Muslims, there were the Iranian-speaking Tadjiks, and there were Kazakhs,
Kirgiz, Uzbeks, Turkmen and many others. The Tsarist regime had ma,de no dis
tinction between those who were likely to be loyal to Russia, like the Finns and
the Baltic Germans, and those who were likely to want independence, like the
Ukrainians and Poles. The policy was simply to Russianize everybody, so by 1917
all the nationalities were bitterly opposed to tsarist rule.
Before they came to power the Bolsheviks claimed to be sympathetic to
demands for independence, if any national group felt strongly enough about it.
In 1913 Lenin spoke of the need for a gentle approach to the Poles: ‘The Poles
hate Russia, and not without reason. We cannot ignore the strength of their
nationalist feeling. Our revolution will have to treat them very gently and even
allow them to break away from Russia if need be.’ Stalin agreed with Lenin at this
point and in 1913 published an essay entitled Marxism and the Nationalities, in
which he argued that all oppressed peoples should be allowed the right of self-
determination. However, he went on to express the hope that after gaining
independence the nationalities would stage their own socialist revolutions and
then voluntarily rejoin Russia in one large multi-national socialist state. Stalin’s
essay, plus the fact that he was himself a non-Russian (he was a Georgian and
spoke Russian with a strong Georgian accent), earned him the reputation of
being something of an expert on the nationalities problem. When the Bolsheviks

took power, Lenin appointed him Commissar for Nationalities. Together they
drew up The Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia; these rights included
the equality and sovereignty of all the peoples of Russia, free self-determination
‘even to the point of separating and forming separate states’ and the abolition of
all national and national-religious principles.44 Only a few weeks later the gov
ernment began to carry out the policy by granting Finland full independence.
Between January and March 1918, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan
took Lenin and Stalin at their word and declared themselves independent. In
February-March 1918 Belorussia and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania were occupied by the Germans who encouraged them to declare
independence from Russia. In Belorussia the communist party eventually gained
control and formed the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic; however, the three
Baltic states were allowed to remain outside the USSR until 1939 when they were
again occupied by the Russians on the outbreak of the Second World War.
Before very long though, the attitude of the Bolshevik leaders changed and
Stalin in particular became hostile to the independence movement. In fact
although he was a Georgian he ended up being far more of a Russian nationalist
than many of the Russians themselves. There were several reasons for this
reversal of policy. The recognition of Finnish independence was followed by a
disastrous civil war. The struggle for independence had been led by the Social
Democrats who had won a majority in the Finnish parliament in the elections of
1916; the Russian Bolsheviks were happy to recognize the independence of
Finland under a socialist government. However, right-wing groups or Whites
under the command of General Mannerheim, and helped by the Germans,
attacked the socialists, and by May 1918 were in control of the whole country. In
the following White terror, thousands of people were murdered and an estimated
12,000 Red prisoners died in prison camps. The new governments in the Ukraine,
Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were also anti-communist. The Ukrainians
were the most troublesome: their leader, Petliura, ordered all Ukrainian troops
fighting in the Russian armies to walk away and return home. During the Civil
War, when Moscow wanted to send troops against the White armies in the south,
Petliura refused to allow them to pass through the wedge of Ukrainian territory
separating northern and southern Russia. Worse still, he began to attack the
Ukrainian Bolsheviks who were rapidly getting stronger.
Many of the Russian Bolshevik leaders, most notably Bukharin, had argued all
along that it was foolish to grant independence to nationalities before they had
become communist, in case Russia found herself surrounded by a ring of hostile
states. Exactly that situation had now arisen and was threatening the survival of
Russia’s revolution. Stalin came round to agreeing with Bukharin and in January
1918 the government announced a change of policy: a nation could have self-
determination only if the working-class demanded it, and not just to satisfy the
middle-classes. The ultimate aim was for a federal constitution in which the
smaller nations must accept overall control from Moscow but would have their
own parliaments for internal affairs. In other words a nation could only have its
independence if it was being ruled by communists, and even then it would
immediately have to surrender a large measure of that independence by joining
a Russian federal state. During the Civil War the government took decisive

action: in the Ukraine a communist regime was imposed by force; after initial
brutality'Lenin insisted that Ukrainian national culture must be respected, and
gradually the communists won the support of a substantial proportion of the
peasants.
In Transcaucasia a similar process took place. Azerbaijan was the first to return
to the Russian fold. In Baku, the main city, there was a large Bolshevik party
membership who championed the cause of the (mainly Muslim) working classes
and who were demanding that the Red Army should come and rescue them from
the bourgeois nationalists who had declared Azerbaijan independent in May
1918. At the end of April 1920 there was very little resistance when the Red Army
entered Baku. The Christian Armenians, who lived on both sides of the frontier
between Russia and Turkey, had gone through a troubled period. With Russia
and Turkey on opposite sides during the First World War, the Turks systematic
ally murdered thousands of the Armenians living in their territory and deported
thousands of others. Estimates of those killed between 1915 and 1922 vary from
600,000 to 2.5 million; tens of thousands of refugees managed to escape to
Russian Armenia. The Armenian government, led by the party known as the
Dashnaks (Armenian Revolutionary Federation), made the mistake of launching
an invasion of the eastern part of the Turkish province of Anatolia, claiming it for
Armenia. This only provoked a Turkish counter-attack which by November 1920
had brought the Armenians to the verge of defeat. Moscow took advantage of this
situation, demanding that the Dashnaks agree to accept a Soviet government in
Armenia. In the circumstances they had very little choice, and in December 1920
the independent republic of Armenia came to an end.
Georgia, the third of the Transcaucasian states, was a different case: it already
had a socialist government of Mensheviks, who were supported by a large major
ity of the Georgian people - they won 75 per cent of the votes in the elections for
their parliament. They were providing stable government and had introduced
a programme of social and economic reform, including land reform ^ breaking
up large estates and redistributing land among the peasants. Georgia was already
being hailed by world socialist leaders as a shining example of how to organize
the classic Marxist state. In May 1920 the Moscow government signed a treaty
with Georgia, recognizing its independence and promising not to interfere in its
internal affairs. But in reality the Soviet leadership was determined that Georgia
must be ‘sovietized', as they put it. Lenin hoped that it could be achieved
gradually and peacefully, but Stalin was impatient. In February 1921, he and his
close associate, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, another Georgian, stirred up the Georgian
Bolsheviks to stage a rising against the Menshevik government; the Red Army
moved in to help, the Mensheviks were forced to flee, and Georgia once again
became part of Russia.
In the vast area to the east of the Caspian Sea, bordering on Iran, Afghanistan,
India and China, the inhabitants were mainly Muslim. Relations between Russians
and Muslims varied, but in some areas, progressive Muslim intellectuals joined the
communist party in the hope of modernizing Muslim society. During and shortly
after the Civil War, sometimes by force, sometimes with local co-operation, the
Soviet government set up a series of Soviet Socialist Republics - Bashkir, Tatar,
Turkmen, Kirghiz, Kazakh, Uzbek and Tadjik. By March 1921 therefore, apart
t

from the loss of Finland, the three Baltic states and some territory to Poland and
Turkey, the communists had more or less restored the frontiers of the old Russian
empire.
(b) The formation of the Transcaucasian republic

Lenin and Stalin both thought Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan should be
amalgamated into one republic of Transcaucasia. This would make it easier for
Moscow to control the area, and it would help to improve relations between the
three states, which were constantly squabbling over frontiers and territory. There
was also the hope that Turkey would be less likely to interfere in Armenian affairs
if Armenia became part of a larger state, and, so it was argued, amalgamation
would help the economies of the three states to develop more successfully. The
leading Georgian communists objected, claiming that their sovereignty would be
curtailed and their separate identity lost in a large Transcaucasian state; they
demanded that they should be admitted to the USSR on the same terms as
Ukraine. Nevertheless enough of them were persuaded to enable the scheme to
go ahead, and in March 1922 the Federal Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics
of Transcaucasia formally came into being.
(c) The development of the party state and the background

to the new constitution
In his book State and Revolution written in August-September 1917, Lenin put
forward the traditional Marxist view that the state was repressive and should
‘wither away'; when freedom existed there would be no need for a state. The
early decrees of the Sovnarkom (the Soviet of People’s Commissars) laid stress
on ‘popular initiative and social reconstruction from below' by workers and
peasants. In 1918 the first constitution was introduced for the new state, which
was called the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). The consti
tution was based on the Soviets, and it attempted to be democratic and decen
tralized so that workers and peasants could exercise some power and initiative
through the network of elected Soviets. Ordinary workers and peasants elected
their local Soviets, whose members chose delegates to their provincial Congress
of Soviets. They in turn chose delegates to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets,
which had 3000 members. They elected the 300-member Central Executive
Committee of the Congress of Soviets. At the top was Sovnarkom which usually
had ten members and was chaired by Lenin. In theory Sovnarkom was supposed
to submit decrees to the Central Executive Committee for approval. In the early
days it was still a multi-party state and the Soviets were open to all parties such as
Mensheviks and SRs which accepted Soviet power. While Lenin was in reasonable
health most of the important government decisions were taken by Sovnarkom.
Alongside the official soviet government structure there was an equivalent
communist party organ at each level. At the top was the Political Bureau (Polit
buro), the party equivalent of the Sovnarkom; at local level there were the local
communist party groups, who sent delegates to the Party Congress, and above
that there was the Central Committee of the communist party, known as the

Praesidium. During the Civil War the Bolshevik or communist party gradually
began to lake on more power. After the Mensheviks and the SRs were outlawed
for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’, the communist members of Sovnarkom
were left as the acting government, and since they were all members of the Polit
buro, in effect the governing body of the party, the Politburo began to act as the
government. The circumstances of the war required quick decisions and so the
Politburo members got into the habit of regarding themselves as the government
and continued to do so when the war was over.
By 1921 therefore the government situation had been completely transformed.
Decision-making was concentrated firmly in the hands of the party leadership,
and the dictatorship of the proletariat was nowhere in evidence. Lenin defended
this development on the grounds that the working class was ‘exhausted and is
naturally weak in a country that is in ruins.' If the workers were exhausted and
their level of ‘political culture’ was low, then the most advanced workers and
their leaders must rule the country - and that meant the communist party. This
also meant increased centralization of the state at the expense of local power;
many communists had now come round to the view that the party should have
primacy over the government structure. Lenin and Trotsky were not happy about
this latest development and wanted to keep the party and the government struc
tures separate. Stalin on the other hand approved of the party becoming domin
ant because by the time of Lenin's death he had built up enormous personal
power within the party. Lenin aimed to strengthen the governmental structures,
but after May 1922 when he became increasingly incapacitated, Sorvnarkom
declined in importance and it was the Politburo that became the most powerful
political body in the country. It was against this background that the new consti
tution, which went into operation in January 1923, was drawn up.
(d) Lenin and Stalin fall out over the new constitution
\
The general feeling among the party leadership was that there was à need to
formalize the developments that had been taking place and to bring the separate
republics into a closer and more centralized union with the Russian republic. It
was felt that this would help economic reconstruction and it would enable them
to present a united front of Soviet republics against the threat of encirclement by
hostile capitalist states. Some communists saw the new constitution as a counter
balance to NEP - to tighten up control from Moscow in the face of an emerging
new capitalist class. Stalin saw it as a chance to increase his own power via the
party machine; as Lenin’s health deteriorated there was clearly going to be a
struggle for power before very long, and Stalin was determined to be as well-
placed as possible when that time came.
It was over the exact nature of the USSR that Lenin and Stalin disagreed. Lenin
wanted all the republics to join together in the Russian Federation in which they
would all have equal status and which would be ruled by a Federal Union
government, ‘presided over in turn by a Russian, a Ukrainian, a Georgian, etc.’,
and not by the government of the Russian republic in Moscow. However, Stalin,
by now an intense Russian nationalist, disagreed with this - although he was
a non-Russian, he wanted the other nationalities to be subordinate to the
t
Figure 5.2 Lenin and Stalin looking pleased with themselves at Gorky in 1992.
Russians; the Russian government in Moscow must be the dominant one; there
was no question of an equal partnership. He called this idea ‘autonomization’; it
meant that although in theory the non-Russian republics would have some rights
of self-government, in practice overall control would be in the hands of the RFSR
in Moscow. He even accused Lenin of being ‘soft on the nationalities.’ Although
Lenin was ill by this time, he was determined to have his way and he persuaded
the Politburo to support him. Staiin wisely decided to avoid a confrontation and

Lenin's plan was adopted. On 31 December 1922 the new constitution was
approved* in principle by an All-Union Congress of Soviets, and the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) officially came into existence. The Georgians
welcomed this but were still nQt happy about amalgamation and they resented
the overbearing attitude of Stalin and Ordzhonikidze, the Politburo representative
in Georgia. It was reported that Ordzhonikidze had beaten up one of the Georgian
leaders who had called him ‘a Stalinist arsehole’. Lenin was dismayed by such
violent behaviour, and began to take steps to have Stalin removed from his posi
tion as Party Secretary. Sadly Lenin’s health and influence declined during 1923,
and no steps were taken against Stalin (see sections 6.1(a) and (b) for details).
At first the USSR consisted of four republics - Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia and
Transcaucasia; Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan joined in 1925. The governmental
structure of the new constitution was in many ways similar to that of the 1918
constitution. Each republic had a Congress of Soviets which sent a number of
delegates to the Union Congress of Soviets, proportionate to the size of its popu
lation. The Union Congress elected a Central Executive Committee composed of
two chambers: the larger one was the Council of the Union, again consisting of
delegates chosen according to the size of population of the individual republics.
The delegates from the Russian republic were in a large majority because of
Russia’s much larger population. The smaller chamber was the Council of Nation
alities in which each national group had equal representation - five delegates
from each republic. The Central Executive Committee appointed the Sovnarkom
for the USSR. Correspondingly each republic had its own Central Executive
Committee and Sovnarkom.
The USSR government in Moscow was to have full control over foreign aritimili-
tary affairs, defence, overseas trade and ‘the struggle against counter-revolution’;
the republics were to have some control over their own internal economic affairs,
agriculture, health and education; and they had the right, in theory, to withdraw
from the Union. Although the new constitution stressed the equality of the
republics and seemed to give them considerable control over their internal
affairs, in practice this turned out not to be the case. Because it was now a one-
party state, the local communist party leaders controlled the governments of the
republics; most of the time they simply carried out Moscow’s orders. If there was
a conflict of interest, the All-Union government could overrule any laws passed
by the republics; and the All-Union government had control of the budgets of the
republics. In effect, therefore, the constitution was a significant step towards
centralized control of the USSR from Moscow. So although Lenin thought he had
got his own way and solved the nationalities problem, the long-term outcome
was not at all what he had intended. Stalin had got what he wanted over Georgia
and had managed to steer the new constitution a substantial part of the way
along the road to domination by Moscow.
In the central government the Congress of Soviets and the Central Executive
Committee turned out to be merely discussion bodies; no voting on important
issues took place and no vital decisions were taken. In theory the Sovnarkom was
the body which decided on policy and issued decrees, but as we saw earlier, it
was the Communist party Politburo acting as Sovnarkom which was the real
power in the country. The Politburo, working through the bureaucratic party

Lenin and th e Bolsheviks in p o w e r
17 3
Map 5.3 The USSR before the Second World War.

machine, was the body which ran the USSR; and it was not even mentioned in
the constitution. Lenin’s attempt to strengthen the governmental structure at the
expense of the party machine had failed. In fact Robert Service believes that this
whole business of the new constitution ‘was the greatest political setback for
Lenin in his party since before the February Revolution of 1917.'45
In spite of the tightening political control, most of the party leaders recognized
that they would have to tread carefully in their treatment of the nationalities.
It would be unwise to attempt to ‘Russianize’ them as the tsarist regime had
done. At the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923 it was decided that ‘Great Russian
chauvinism’ was as great a danger as nationalism within the republics. Even
Stalin accepted for the time being a new official policy of denouncing Russian
chauvinism and encouraging and heightening the awareness of national cultures.
Self-government was given to the Bashkirs, the Tatars, Kirghizia and Dagestan.
The Tatar and other languages were accepted as equal in status to Russian;
thousands of new schools were built and Russians were forbidden to settle in
Kirghizia so that the local nomadic tribes would be free to move around unhin
dered. The party claimed that national minorities received more sympathetic
treatment in the USSR than anywhere else in eastern or central Europe; it was
hoped that this would help to recruit more party members among the non-Russian
population in order to strengthen the local organizations. In the mid-1920s there
was a period of stability when it seemed that the nationalities were accepting the
centralized Soviet regime. The policy had one drawback: it resulted in a great
flowering of national cultures; this inevitably stimulated nationalist pride and
patriotism and so the desire for more independence grew. In the early 1930s
Stalin took steps to dampen nationalist enthusiasm. Even in the 1920s there were
limits to the Politburo’s patience; persistent trouble-makers were dealt with by
the Cheka (known from 1923 onwards as the United Main Political Administra
tion, or OGPU); and in 1924 an attempted uprising in Georgia was crushed by the
Red Army. N
5.9 Education, culture, the arts and religion

under the Bolsheviks
One of the better features of life under the Bolsheviks was that, with the obvious
exception of religion, there was more freedom of expression than there ever was
under the Tsars.46 This was partly because the Bolsheviks felt they needed to win
the support of as many intellectuals as possible to help spread education and the
cultural changes necessary for building a socialist society. There was a feeling
among many writers and artists that they must move out of their ‘ivory towers’,
make contact with the workers, become involved in everyday life, and help to
create the new ‘Soviet man and woman’. As the poet Mayakovsky put it: ‘Let us
make the streets our brushes, the squares our palette.’ The first reaction of most
intellectuals to the Bolshevik takeover was not encouraging: many left Russia and
never returned, while others refused to co-operate with the new regime. However,
as the Bolsheviks became established, some of the émigrés, like the composer

Sergei Prokofiev and the writer Maxim Gorky, returned and became at least
partially reconciled with the regime. Lenin actively encouraged experimentation
in all forms of the arts, although he did not always like the results. At the end of
the 1920s, as Stalin moved into the ascendant, a new phase of intolerance began.
(a) Education
The Bolsheviks saw universal education as absolutely vital for achieving the great
cultural transformation, and Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, was a great
advocate of high-quality mass education. Anatoli Lunacharsky was made Com
missar for Education in 1917; he was responsible for all schools, although in the
ory the church schools came under the supervision of local Soviets. Hundreds of
new schools were built, especially in rural areas. By 1927 education was free and
compulsory for all up to the age of 12; the government had intended to provide
free education up to the age of 17, but resources and numbers of teachers were
insufficient. Institutes or workers’ faculties were set up so that ambitious workers
could prepare themselves to enter higher education; any Red Army recruits who
were unable to read had to attend classes as part of their training. It was esti
mated that in 1927 about 51 per cent of the populadon were literate, as opposed
to only 35 per cent in 1907. In the universities, workers and peasants were given
preference over young people from ‘bourgeois’ backgrounds. Another innova
tion was the Proletkult organization which was meant to encourage and develop
working-class culture. It worked through factory clubs which organized theatre
groups, choirs, music groups, art and creative writing classes and sporting events.
Lunacharsky had a grand vision which went far beyond simply teaching the
children of the workers to read and write; he wanted them to have a wide general
education so that they could rise to the level of the intelligentsia, and he intended
to take class differences out of education. All this would be offered in a new type
of school - the United Labour School - where mixed courses of vocational and
academic education could be followed by all children, whatever their class back
ground. He encouraged progressive teaching methods - more relaxed discipline
and project work instead of examinations. There was opposition to these schools
from other Bolsheviks who thought they were encouraging bourgeois values, or
more seriously, that they were not developing the skills needed to modernize the
economic life of the country. Although Lunacharsky never came anywhere near
achieving his full programme, he was allowed to persevere until 1930 and great
progress was made. Under Stalin’s leadership, however, education for workers’
children concentrated more on narrow vocational training in order to produce
the required number of apprentices for the factories. Progressive teaching
methods were abandoned and class divisions were brought back into education;
Lunacharsky was removed from his post.47
(b) Literature and the theatre

When the First World War broke out in 1914 Russia was enjoying a great cultural
revival known as the Silver Age (see section 2.1(k)) in which avant-garde writers,
artists and musicians led the way. Many of the avant-gardistes welcomed the

revolutions; the Symbolist poet Alexandr Blok stayed in Russia and soon pro
duced two' of his greatest poems. The Twelve and The Scythians which glorified
the revolution as an irresistible force destroying the old capitalist system of Europe.
The Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was another committed Bolshevik sup
porter, although Lenin was not an admirer of his work. Writers who were in
sympathy with the regime formed the All-Russian Association of Proletarian
Writers (RAPP); they wanted working-class values to be dominant and did all
they could to encourage cultural activities in factories; they claimed to be the
official voice of the communist party. Writers who were not communists were
allowed to publish, provided they were not critical of the regime; they were known
as ‘fellow-travellers'.
But there was a limit to the tolerance of the Politburo; the secret police kept
adose watch on all the leading intellectuals, including writers and artists.
In August 1921 the poet Nikolai Gumelev was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka,
accused of being involved in a right-wing plot and executed without trial; although
Gumelev was known to have monarchist sympathies, there was not a shred of
evidence to support the accusation. Blok became disillusioned with the Bolsheviks,
his health deteriorated and he died shortly before the execution of Gumelev.
These two events were the last straw for Maxim Gorky who left Russia in October
1921. In the spring of 1922 a large group of around 160 writers and academics,
who were considered to have overstepped the mark and were held responsible
for ‘the growing influence of a revitalized bourgeois ideology in the young Soviet
Republic,' were expelled from the country. All writings were now to be strictly
censored. Under the NEP remaining writers were encouraged and well paid.
A great clutch of Civil War novels appeared, of which the best known was And
Quiet Flows the Don (1929) by Mikhail Sholokhov, which dealt with the experi
ences of the Don Cossacks during the war years. Also popular with the general
public was a new genre of satirical stories poking gentle fun at the Soviet system.
Lunacharsky gave the job of relating the theatre to everyday life to^the well-
known director Vsevolod Meyerhold. He experimented with new techniques,
dispensing with the curtain and the proscenium arch; he made use of platforms
of varying levels and ramps sloping down to the first row of seats, multi-purpose
movable sets, and eventually complete theatre in the round. The idea was to
break down the division between the actors and the audience and encourage the
audience to participate and express its reactions to the drama. Not many new
Russian plays were written in the early years of the regime, but the ones which
were produced were based on the theme of the struggle between the evil capitalist
and the noble worker; it was all part of the attempt to win over the support of the
general public. Although Meyerhold was forced to resign after only a few months
because his ideas were too avant-garde for the authorities, he continued to work
and experiment in the theatre.
Another famous actor, director and producer who stayed in Russia after the
revolution was Konstantin Stanislavsky, founder of the Moscow Arts Theatre in
1898. His new style of acting technique was extremely influential both in the
USSR and abroad - actors were encouraged to use memories of their own experi
ences and emotions and to empathize with the characters they were playing. He
wanted them to actually feel the emotions which the characters were supposed

to be feeling, in order to achieve convincing performances which were more
appropriate to the greater realism of the twentieth century. His production of
a new play by V.V. Ivanov about the revolution, Armoured Train 14-69, in 1927,
was regarded as a milestone in the progressive Russian theatre.
Public interest in the theatre spread rapidly as workers’ drama groups flour
ished. It was reckoned that by 1920 there were three thousand theatres in the
Russian Republic alone, and the Red Army and Navy ran over a thousand theatres.
The regime used the theatre for propaganda, telling the approved version of the
Revolution and the Civil War. Among the most spectacular productions were the
massive street theatre events, like The Storming of the Winter Palace which was
performed in 1920 on the third anniversary of the Bolshevik coup. It was enacted in
Petrograd on three huge stages in Palace Square, with the Winter Palace itself as
part of die set. There was a cast of 10,000 and an audience estimated at 100,000.
(c) Art, architecture and music

In the world of art things seemed to be getting off to a good start under the
Bolsheviks. Wassily Kandinsky, the great pioneer of abstract art, who had consid
erable sympathy with the revolution and its aims, was appointed Professor at the
newly founded Free State Art Studios. In 1920 he was made an honorary Pro
fessor at the University of Moscow and was responsible for creating the Russian
Academy of Artistic Sciences in Moscow in 1921. He also worked in Lunacharsky's
Commissariat for Enlightenment where he was responsible for deciding which
works of art should be bought; one of his greatest achievements was in organizing
22 museums throughout the Union.
Marc Chagall was another famous artist who supported the revolution and
he was appointed Commissar for Art in his native Vitebsk in Belorussia. He
launched himself enthusiastically into projects for a local academy and museum
and on the first anniversary of the revolution he decorated the streets of Vitebsk
with murals which portrayed, among other things, green cows and horses, and
a smiling Lenin hovering over a newly married couple. Sadly there were soon
bitter disagreements between Chagall and local party leaders who found his
work too avant-garde and claimed that the workers could not understand it. He
moved to Moscow and worked for a time designing sets and costumes for theatre
productions. Both Kandinsky and Chagall became disenchanted with the regime
when some of the officials began to put pressure on artists to produce art to
which the workers could relate. This was dismissed by the avant-gardists as ‘five-
kopek art’. Kandinsky left Russia in December 1921 and Chagall in 1922; neither
of them returned.
A group known as the Constructivists, which included the artists Malevich and
Rodchenko, and the architect Tatlin, tried to bring contemporary art into every
day life by designing clothes and furniture for use in the factory. In the realms of
architecture, the 1920s saw some remarkable new designs. There was Tatlin’s
model for a monument to the Third International, which took the form of a spiral
tower (1919-20); Leonidov's design for the new Lenin Institute (1927); experi
mental houses in Moscow, Saratov and Sverdlovsk designed by Moses Ginsburg
(1928-30), and the designs for the new town of Magnitogorsk drawn up by

a group of architects led by Leonidov, which were much more humane than the
high-rise blocks which became familiar as typical Stalinist architecture.
In one sense music came off well since the new regime gave musical opportun
ities to all sections of the public. A great deal of talent was discovered that might
otherwise have been missed. In another sense, however, music was not as
successful as the other arts. Russia's two greatest composers of the pre-war era,
Stravinsky and Rachmaninov, both left the country; Dmitri Shostakovich (bom
1906) tried to produce music to appeal to the working class; but much of his
output during the early years was not among his best work. Most of the musical
experimentation had a mildly eccentric air and was soon abandoned: some
orchestras played without conductors, since a conductor was not considered to
be socialistically correct; some music was composed to be played in factories
using factory sirens and hooters as instruments (even Shostakovich used factory
whistles in his Second Symphony). Probably most bizarre was the changing of
well-known opera titles and librettos to make them politically acceptable - thus
Glinka’s popular opera A Life for the Tsar had its libretto rewritten and it was
renamed The Hammer and the Sickle. In fact, with the possible exception of
Shostakovich's First Symphony (1926), no really outstanding music was composed
in Russia during the 1920s. Classical orchestral music, opera and ballet were
certainly popular with ordinary people who had been unable to afford to see and
hear them before the revolution - but what they wanted most was Tchaikovsky,
Borodin, Rachmaninov and Rimsky-Korsakov.
(d) The cinema

Lenin was extremely enthusiastic about the cinema; he saw it as possibly the
most important of the arts, and the film industry was nationalized in August
1919. He thought it could turn out to be a more powerful propaganda medium
than the written word, since at least half the population was illiterate. l\e wanted
films to be informative ‘like the best of our soviet newspapers,’ füll of the new
socialist ideas, but entertaining and amusing as well. Lunacharsky promised that
in the new Soviet films there would be ‘no glorification of bloodshed and vio
lence, no appeal to race or religious bigotry and hatred: the cinema will be used
to teach citizenship and love of humanity.’ A group of talented young directors
emerged which included Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander
Dovzhenko. Eisenstein was greatly influenced by Meyerhold and was the dir
ector mainly responsible for staging The Storming of the Winter Palace in 1920.
He performed plays in factories and a gasworks before turning to the cinema. His
first major film, Strike, about the brutal repression of a strike which took place
just before the Fust World War, came out in 1924, and this was followed in 1925
by Battleship Potemkin, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution.
This film turned out to be the finest example of Eisenstein’s montage technique,
in which some scenes were shot using several cameras, making possible a dramatic
mixture of close-up and long-shot. For the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik
coup he produced October which recreated the revolution (not altogether
accurately) so graphically and dramatically that some of the shots were often
taken for authentic newsreel clips.

Pudovkin’s films concentrated more on individual heroes and heroines rather
than on the grand sweep of events. He focused on the actors who were encour
aged to use Stanislavsky’s realistic methods, so that he was probably the director
who came closest to social realism. His most important films were Mother (1926),
based on Maxim Gorky’s novel, which tells the story of a mother who is gradually
converted to the idea of revolution through the influence of her son; The End of
St Petersburg follows the experiences of a young peasant during the war and the
revolution which changed St Petersburg into Leningrad (1927); and Storm over
Asia (1928) which deals with incidents in the Civil War. The Ukrainian
Dovzhenko began his film career in 1926 as a scriptwriter with the Ukrainian
Film Company. As a director he was responsible for Svenigora (1928), Arsenal
(1929), which is a portrayal of the revolution in Ukraine, and Earth, which came
out in 1930. Each one of these films is a masterpiece in its different way, and they
all won great critical acclaim abroad. They were popular with Russian audiences
too, but ironically the Russian public tended to prefer American thrillers and
Tarzan adventures.
Film also played an important role in the more direct mass propaganda
campaigns of the Agit-ships and Agit-trains which travelled all over the country.
They contained cinemas which showed newsreel, documentary and lecture films,
and they carried collections of propaganda art and posters. Usually there would
be poets and writers on board who would read out their work, and there would
be artists who decorated the ships and trains with images presenting topical
messages. Whether the regime succeeded in creating the new ‘Soviet man and
woman’ with this barrage of propaganda during the 1920s is open to question.
The problem was that the ‘ordinary person in the street' was more interested in
being entertained than politically educated. The best of the writers and film-mak
ers had some success in combining the two, but the traditional popular culture
continued to exist in the cafes, bars, music halls and homes, where people shared
jokes and irreverent stories about the communists. R.G. Suny tells a popular joke
which circulated in the mid-1920s - an old man on a trolley-bus, feeling sad at the
miserable conditions of his life, sighs long and deeply, ‘Oi’. His wife quickly
hushes him with a warning: ‘Fool, don't talk counter-revolution in public.’48
(e) Religion
Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders were atheists who accepted Marx’s claim that
religion was merely an invention of the ruling classes to keep the people docile
and under control - the ‘opium of the masses’. The Orthodox Church was seen as
a rival in the struggle for control of the country7s soul. For the Bolsheviks, com
munism was the only religion, and they were determined that people should
worship the Soviet state instead of God. All the Church lands had been taken
away in 1917; Church schools were taken over and even the Church buildings
were now owned by the local Soviets which hired them out for services. Hundreds
of priests were arrested by the Cheka, but the peasants were not happy about this
and began to elect their own priests instead. The government ridiculed religious
believers as backward; they tried to replace the religious holidays with secular
holidays like May Day and Revolution Day; Red baptisms and weddings were

encouraged - children were said to be ‘Octobered’ instead of baptized and cou
ples took their marriage vows in front of a portrait of Lenin instead of at the altar.
These ceremonies were popular with young party members, but most peasants
resisted and stayed with the traditional sacraments.
In 1921, probably because of their lack of success, the Bolsheviks stepped up
their anti-religion campaign. The shooting of priests began and Lenin accused
the Church of refusing to sell their consecrated valuables to help the famine relief
fund. In fact the Church had been giving generous help to the campaign and
there was no need for the sale of treasures; but Lenin needed an excuse for the
vicious attack he was about to launch. In February 1922 local Soviets were
ordered to remove all valuable objects from churches; violent clashes were
reported from all over the country as people resisted. Some members of the Polit
buro felt that the campaign was proving to be counter-productive and voted to
end the confiscations. However, Lenin was furious at this and overruled the Polit
buro; the memorandum containing his instructions (which was not published
until 1990) does not reveal him in a good light at this time when, some historians
have claimed, he was trying to achieve his aims without violence: the time had
come, he argued, to destroy the Church Tor many decades... to assure ourselves
of capital worth several hundred million gold roubles... to carry out govern
mental work in general... I have come to the unequivocal conclusion that we
must now wage the most decisive and merciless war against the Black Hundred
clergy49 (see also Document G). Some estimates put the 1922-23 death toll in the
campaign as high as 7000 clergy killed in clashes, and 8000 people executed,
including a group of bishops.
Since many of the leading Bolsheviks were Jewish, the Jews had a better time at
the hands of the new regime than under the Tsars, and restrictions on their activ
ities were removed after 1917. But during the Civil War they suffered vicious
attacks from the Whites, and also from Ukrainian nationalists who resented the
fact that Ukrainian Jews opposed separation from Russia. Consequently many
Jews joined the communist party and Jews became influential in the party hier
archy and the bureaucracy. The Bolsheviks also tried to win over the Muslims, of
whom there were over 15 million living in Central Asia, the Volga region (the
Tatars) and Transcaucasia (the Azerbaijanis). Traditional Muslims remained
hostile to the regime, and although progressive Muslims tended to side with the
Russians, very few actually went so far as to join the communist party. The Koran
remained their Bible, not the works of Karl Marx.
5.10 Assessments of Lenin

(a) Lenin and Marxism
One of the debates which used to occupy historians a great deal is the extent to
which Lenin’s ideas and actions deviated from Marxism. It is difficult to be pre
cise about this, firstly because Marx himself modified his principles during the
forty years that he was writing, and secondly because Lenin had no absolutely
fixed ideas: he had basic aims which were reasonably consistent, but when it

came to the question of how best to achieve his aims, he was a practical realist
who adapted and changed his methods and policies in response to circum
stances. What Lenin did was to build on Marx's ideas and refîne them to suit the
circumstances in Russia at the time. Not all of Lenin’s modifications and add
itions were original - many of them had their roots in earlier Russian history. It is
possible to identify several areas in which Marx’s ideas were developed further.
In his 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? Lenin first put forward the idea of the
small elite group of full-time dedicated professional revolutionaries who might
come from any class provided they were totally committed. They were the
advanced guard who would show the workers how to develop a ‘modem socialist
consciousness’. This was probably the most original aspect of Leninism; most of
the strict Marxists strongly disapproved because they believed it would lead to
dictatorship; however, others thought it was a realistic approach, given the polit
ical and social conditions of Tsarist Russia.
Lenin disagreed with the Mensheviks and most other Bolsheviks in the timing
of the revolution. They followed Marx in the belief that there must be a long gap,
probably years rather than months, between the bourgeois revolution and the
workers’ revolution, and that industry, technology and education must be highly
developed before there was any attempt to establish a socialist state. Lenin had
rejected this idea of fixed historical stages as early as 1905, and in fact in 1881,
shortly before his death, Marx himself had suggested that in certain circum
stances it might be possible to carry out both revolutions together and introduce
a socialist state, even in a peasant society. The circumstances needed for this to
be possible were some sort of massive international catastrophe (like the First
World War) brought about by the failings of capitalism, and at the same time
revolutions in other countries. Lenin came to the conclusion that capitalism had
reached its final form with imperialism, which had led to colonial rivalry and
thus helped to cause the First World War. Capitalists would therefore be opposed
not only by the workers but also by their oppressed colonial peoples, who were
the natural allies of the workers.
In his 1917 April Theses Lenin argued that the opportunity provided by the
situation in Russia at the time was too good to miss and urged an immediate
seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. The strict Marxists objected on the grounds
that Russian society was not yet sufficiently industrialized for socialism to be
established; the peasants would never co-operate. But Lenin believed that an
alliance with the poorer peasants could play a vital part in the revolution.
Another divergence of ideas was over the question of how the new state would
be organized after the revolution. Marx had given only minimum guidelines - the
old bourgeois system would be destroyed by force, the state would wither away,
and there would be a classless society and a dictatorship of the proletariat in
which the workers would run the country in their own interests. In State and
Revolution, which he wrote during the summer of 1917, Lenin added more
details. He argued that the apparatus of state authority would have to be main
tained for some considerable time in order to achieve the destruction of the
capitalist system and the substitution of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This
would be the period of class war, when the collective dictatorship would
establish socialism; this would involve, among other things, worker control of the

faetones and the highest level of social welfare systems ever seen anywhere in
the world. When this was achieved and all resistance from the former ruling class
had been finally crushed, dictatorship would no longer be needed and the state
would start to wither away; however, no timetable or time-scale was given for
this. Arguably these ideas were not a significant departure from Marxism since
Marx himself was quite clear that it would take some time to kill off bourgeois
institutions. Unfortunately it didn’t work out quite as Lenin had hoped; remark
ably generous welfare schemes were introduced, but the state did not wither
away. As we have seen, the party bureaucracy grew larger and the state became
even stronger.
After coming to power Lenin also had to revise his ideas about the role of the
workers in running industry. Although the idea of workers’ control was sup
ported by the ‘workers' opposition’, it soon became clear that workers lacked the
necessary expertise; a return^ to some of the previous capitalist practices was
thought to be unavoidable, and so the workers soon lost one of their main gains
from October - worker management of the factories. This was quickly followed
during the Civil War period by the terror, the forced requisition of grain from the
peasants, the militarization and the centralization of the regime; all of which
gave rise to the claim that the ordinary workers were no better off. Was all this an
integral part of Leninism or was it forced on him by the circumstances? (see sec
tion 5.4). The last and most startling of Lenin's deviations from Marxism were
NEP, the apparent trends away from violence and the adoption of a more grad
ual, more ‘civilized’ approach to socialism. Clearly Lenin’s ideas were constantly
changing according to circumstances. Three distinct phases can be identified:
first of all his pre-1918 ideas; these had to be drastically revised when the Bolshe
viks came to power and were faced with the reality (Civil War, absence of other
revolutions, international isolation of Russia) of having to govern the country;
and thirdly the return to state capitalism and a more relaxed approach econom
ically in the NEP phase. N
(b) Lenin - the evil genius?

After Lenin’s death the Politburo, against the wishes of his widow, decided that
his body should be embalmed and put on display in a glass case in a special mau
soleum to be built in Red Square. The apparent success of the NEP had increased
respect for Lenin, and the Politburo members, especially Stalin, hoped to share
in the popularity by presenting themselves as Lenin’s heirs who would continue
his policies. They encouraged the Lenin cult for all they were worth: all his main
works were published (with careful editing), and no shred of criticism was
allowed, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad, and Stalin launched a new drive
called ‘the Lenin Enrolment' to recruit more workers. As a result the party gained
around 240,000 new members. Stalin gave a series of lectures which were pub
lished under the title Foundations of Leninism. Lenin was revered almost as
a saint and the faithful flocked to Moscow to view his remains as though they
were a religious relic.
A quite different view of Lenin was current among émigré Russians, Social
Democrats, Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who had known him and

worked with him for many years. Many of them commented on the strange
mixture of attractive and repellent qualities in Lenin. The Menshevik Alexander
Potresov described him as an ‘evil genius’. He claimed that nobody else among
the revolutionary leaders possessed the mysterious hypnotic effect on people
that emanated from Lenin, not even Plekhanov and Martov, and this was what
enabled him to dominate people. They respected Plekhanov and they loved
Martov, but only Lenin did they follow unquestioningly as their sole and
indisputable leader. Lenin was the rare phenomenon of a man with an iron will
and indomitable energy, who combined a fanatical faith in the movement and
the cause with a no lesser faith in himself. ‘Behind these virtues, however,'
Potresov wrote, Turk equally great defects, negative features which might be
more appropriate in some medieval or Asiatic conqueror.’50
Inside the USSR the saintly view of Lenin survived intact until the late 1980s.
When in 1956 Khrushchev began to denounce the excesses of Stalin's regime, no
criticisms were voiced of Lenin; the official view was that Stalin had betrayed
Leninism, and Lenin was elevated to an even higher pedestal. During the glas-
nost (openness) era after 1985, Gorbachev intended to preserve the Lenin cult,
but he gradually lost control and the critical spotlight spread from Stalin to Lenin
as well. As the archives became accessible, details were published in the USSR for
the first time about Lenin’s role in the Red Terror, the murder of the Tsar and his
family, and the building of the one-party state. After the collapse of the USSR
most Russian historians presented a hostile picture of Lenin. Dmitri Volkogonov
in his massive 1994 biography blamed all the unpleasant features of Soviet his
tory on Lenin - Stalin merely followed Leninist traditions.51 Lenin’s reputation in
Russia probably reached its nadir in 1997-98; in 1997 Alexander Yakovlev, who
had once been a member of Gorbachev’s Politburo, claimed in an interview that
Lenin was the one who had set up a ‘criminal state’; ‘villain number one was
Lenin. Stalin and Hitler were secondary.’52The following year Volkogonov, in his
final book before his death, further sharpened his attack on Lenin. ‘Politics, to be
sure, tends to be immoral,’ he wrote, ‘but in Lenin immorality was exacerbated
by cynicism. Almost every one of his decisions suggests that for him morality was
totally subordinated to political realities... and his main goal - the seizure of
power.’53On the other hand some Russian historians are trying to present a more
balanced interpretation of Soviet history. Robert C. Tucker mentions Irina
Pavlova whose researches suggest that Lenin was not a dictator and that while he
was alive, there was still a certain amount of ‘democratic’ discussion within the
party.54
Among Western historians there have been several revisionists who took
a sympathetic view of Lenin. Moshe Lewin in his 1968 book Lenin's Last Struggle
portrayed Lenin as having been forced unwillingly into policies of violence and
terror, and in his last years, in the face of ill-health and the evil ambitions of
Stalin, struggling unsuccessfully to steer communism into a more peaceful and
civilized phase. In a later book published in 1985, Lewin continued the same
theme. By 1922 ‘an older and wiser Lenin was proposing a new and final series of
innovations known as his "testament” ... it does not mention revolutionary
terror of any sort. Its message is very different: no violent measures as a way of
transforming the social structures of the country! The cultural revolution first, an

understanding with the peasants, and slowness as the supreme virtue; in addition,
a new vision on Lenin's part of socialism as a regime of “civilized co-operators".
It is well known that that set of ideas was disdainfully labelled “liberalism” by
Stalin himself.'55
This sort of interpretation is at opposite poles from the traditional liberal inter
pretation, and was roundly condemned by Richard Pipes in his two-volume work
on Russia from 1899 until 1924. He emphasized that Lenin had a strong streak of
cruelty, that he advocated terror on principle, and that he condemned thousands
of completely innocent people to death. Nor did he show the slightest remorse at
the great loss of life which he had caused. The success of the Bolshevik seizure of
power in 1917 was nothing to do with social forces - it was simply because Lenin
wanted power.56 Orlando Figes seems to reach a similar conclusion: Tn every
thing he did, Lenin’s ultimate purpose was the pursuit of power. Power was for
him not a means - it was the end in itself.’57
A more balanced picture of Lenin is presented by Robert Service, who must
have written more words about Lenin than any other historian over the last
twenty years. His conclusion is that Lenin was certainly ruthless, intolerant and
repressive, and even seemed to enjoy unleashing terror; but although he sought
power, and believed that dictatorship was desirable, power was not an end in
itself. In spite of all his faults, he was a visionary; ‘Lenin truly thought that a better
world should and would be built, a world without oppression and exploitation,
a world without even a state; and it was his judgement, woeful as it was, that the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat would act as midwife to the birth of such a
world... He had in many ways an appealing temperament; friends and relatives
found him boundlessly attractive.’ It seems that Lenin did not become a dictator;
the Bolshevik party never was a unified monolithic organization totally under his
control. Although he usually got his way in the Politburo, it was not always easy;
he did it by skilful persuasion and ‘perpetually impressed his colleagues with his
intellectual breadth and depth.’ Time and again Lenin’s wishes prevailed at the
vital turning-points of the revolution - the decision to seize power in October
1917, the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in 1918, and the introduction of NEP
in 1921. None of these would have happened without Lenin. But he did not get
everything right: it was his idea to invade Poland in 1920 and that ended in humi
liating defeat; and there was his mistaken conviction that other revolutions
would follow the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. But his achievements
make him one of the great political figures of the twentieth century. ‘He led the
October Revolution, founded the USSR and laid down the rudiments of Marxist-
Leninism. He helped to turn a world upside down.'58
(c) Leninism and Stalinism

So what was Lenin's real legacy? Does he bear the responsibility for the even
greater excesses and atrocities of the Stalinist era, as his detractors claim, or did
Stalin betray his vision of a society free from injustice and exploitation? Was
Stalinism merely a continuation of Leninism or something quite different? This
question has been very much in the forefront of historical debate since the
Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. At first the ‘straight line’
•
184 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rushan History
theory- that Stalin was just a continuation of Lenin - was widely accepted among
Western historians. In other words, the forced collectivization of agriculture, the
purges, the Great Terror of the 1930s, the tens of thousands of executions and the
network of labour camps, were the logical conclusion, the inevitable completion
of Leninism. Historians like Adam B. Ulam and Robert H. McNeal point out that
Lenin founded the Cheka which became the KGB under Stalin; Lenin could be
ruthless when he thought it was necessary, for example when he initiated the Red
Terror. Like Stalin during collectivization, Lenin treated the peasants badly
during War Communism. Lenin destroyed the multi-party system in Russia and
created the highly authoritarian structures of the Bolshevik party which Stalin
was able to use.
The revisionists of course take a different view: Moshe Lewin, Robert C. Tucker
and Stephen F. Cohen, on the other hand, argue that there was a fundamental
discontinuity between Lenin and Stalin; things changed radically under Stalin.
As Cohen put it, in a 1977 article, ‘Stalinism was excess, extraordinary extremism.
It was not merely coercive peasant policies, but a virtual civil war against the
peasantry; not merely police repression, or even civil-war style terror, but a holo
caust by terror that victimized tens of millions of people for twenty-five
years... not merely a leader cult, but deification of a despot/59 In fact Lenin
strongly opposed the cult of the individual leader, whereas Stalin began his own
personality cult with his lavish 50th birthday celebrations in 1929. Lenin’s
nationalities policy was the opposite of Stalin’s. Lenin wanted to keep the party
bureaucracy as small and manageable as possible, but Stalin enlarged it. Lenin
encouraged discussion and criticism and got his way by persuading the Polit
buro; Stalin allowed not the slightest criticism. By the time Lenin died in January
1924 the Russian people had accepted his communist party. After all, it was the
people’s party: in the period between 1917 and Lenin’s death well over a million
ordinary people - some of them educated people from a peasant background -
had joined the party and many of them had good jobs in the party bureaucracy.
Even Prince Lvov, the former Provisional Government Prime Minister, acknowl
edged this: ‘The people supports Soviet power,’ he wrote at the end of 1923; ‘they
see that their own type of people are entering into the apparatus, and this makes
them feel that the regime is “their own” ,6° (see Document J).
However, in the ‘Great Terror’ of 1935-39 Stalin in reality destroyed Lenin's
communist party. At least a million members were ‘purged’, its leaders were
murdered and its whole ethos was changed. This was quite different from any
thing that had happened under Lenin. As Robert Conquest points out, ‘Lenin’s
Terror was the product of the years of war and violence, of the collapse of society
and administration, of the desperate acts of rulers precariously riding the flood,
and fighting for control and survival... Stalin, on the contrary, attained complete
control at a time when general conditions were calm... and the country had
accepted, however reluctantly, the existence and stability of the Soviet
Government... It was in cold blood, quite deliberately and unprovokedly, that
Stalin started a new cycle of suffering.' This destruction of Lenin's party and the
Old Bolshevik elite leaders was ‘a revolution as complete as, though more dis
guised than, any previous changes in Russia.'61 In the words of Ronald G. Suny,
‘devoted to Karl Marx’s vision of socialism, in which the working class would

control the machines, factories and other sorts of wealth production, the com
munists led by Lenin believed that the future social order would be based on the
abolition of unearned social privilege, the end of racism and colonial oppression,
the secularization of society, and the empowerment of working people. Yet
within a generation Stalin and his closest comrades had created one of the most
vicious and oppressive states in modem history/62
Documents
The Constituent Assembly
(A) Mark Vishniak, a Right SR deputy and Secretary of the Assembly, describes
the scene at the Tauride Palace on 5 January 1918, the opening day of the
Constituent Assembly.
The closer one approached the palace, the fewer pedestrians were to be seen
and the more soldiers, Red Army men and sailors. They were armed to the
teeth: guns slung over the shoulders, bombs, grenades and bullets, in front
and on the side, everywhere, wherever they could be attached or inserted...
The entire square in front of Taurida Palace was filled with artillery,
machine guns, field kitchens. All the gates to the palace were shut, except for a
wicket gate on the extreme left, through which people with passes were let in.
The armed guards attentively studied one's face before permitting entry: they
inspected one's rear, felt the backside... After more controls the guards
directed delegates into the Assembly Hall. Everywhere there were armed men.
Source: quoted in Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899-1919, p. 550.
(B) Boris Sokolov, a Right SR who had worked as an SR propagandist in the army,
gives the soldiers' view of the Constituent Assembly.
The Constituent Assembly was something totally unknown and unclear to the
mass of the front-line soldiers... their sympathies were clearly with the Soviets.
These were the institutions that were near and dear to them, reminding them
of their own village assemblies... I more than once had occasion to hear the
soldiers, sometimes even the most intelligent of them, object to the Constitu
ent Assembly. To most of them it was associated with the State Duma, an
institution that was remote to them. ‘What do we need some Constituent
Assembly for when we already have our Soviets, where our own deputies can
meet and decide everything?’
Source: quoted in Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Révolution
(1917-1921), p. 68.

The Civil W ar and the Terror
(C) Extracts from Trotsky’s order to the Red Army troops on the southern front,
24 November 1918.
Krasnov and the foreign capitalists who stand behind his back have thrown
on to the Voronezh front hundreds of hired agents who have penetrated,
under various guises, Red Army units and are carrying on their base work,
corrupting and inciting men to desert... I declare that from now on an end
must be put to this by using merciless means:
(i) Every scoundrel who incites anyone to retreat, to desert, or not to fulfil
a military order, will be shot.
(ii) Every soldier of the Red Army who voluntarily deserts his military post, will
be shot.
Death to self-seekers and to traitors!
Death to deserters and to the agents of Krasnov!
Long live the honest soldiers of the Workers' Red Army!
Source: quoted in John Laver, Russia 1914-1941, pp. 23-4.
(D) Viktor Serge writes about the saving of Petrograd, and the Terror. Serge was
an Anarchist, a Bolshevik and a close associate of Trotsky. This led to his
arrest and imprisonment in 1933, though he was later released and allowed
to leave Russia.
(i) On 7 October Iudenich captured Gatchina, about twenty-five miles from

Petrograd. Two days later his advanced forces entered Ligovo, on the city’s
outskirts, about nine miles away... It seemed quite plainly to be our death
agony. There were no trains and no fuel for evacuation, and scarcely a few
dozen cars... I spent my nights with the Communist troops in the outer
defences. The news from the other fronts was so bad that Lenin was
reluctant to sacrifice the last available forces in the defence of a doomed city.
Trotsky thought otherwise. He arrived almost at the last moment and his
presence instantly changed the atmosphere at Smolny. He arrived with a
train, that famous train which had been speeding to and fro along the dif
ferent fronts since the previous year... It was magical. Trotsky kept saying,
‘It is impossible for a little army of 15,000 ex-officers to master a working-
class capital of 700,000 inhabitants’... This session of the Soviet took place
beneath the lofty white columns of the Tauride Palace. Trotsky was all ten
sion and energy: he was, besides, an orator of unique quality, whose metallic
voice projected a great distance. The decision to fight to the death was taken
enthusiastically, and the whole amphitheatre raised a song of immense
power...
(icontinued)

Capable regiments of infantry, recalled from the Polish front, now marched
through the city to take up their positions in the suburbs... Petrograd was
saved on 21 October at the battle of the Pulkovo Heights... Iudenich's troops
rolled back in disorder towards the Estonian frontier...
(ii) The atmosphere was often sharpened because of the perpetuation of the
Terror, by an element of intolerable inhumanity. A notable saying of Lenin
kept rising in my mind: ‘It is a terrible misfortune that the honour of begin
ning the first Socialist revolution should have befallen the most backward
people in Europe.’ Neverthless, within the current situation of Europe,
bloodstained, devastated, and in profound stupor, Bolshevism was, in my
eyes, tremendously and visibly right. It marked a new point of departure in
history...
(iii) I am well aware that terror has been necessary up till now in all great
revolutions... but at the same time I saw that the perpetuation of terror, after
the end of the Civil War and the transition to a period of economic freedom,
was an immense and demoralizing blunder. I was and still am convinced that
the new regime would have felt a hundred times more secure if it had hence
forth proclaimed its reverence, as a Socialist government, for human life and
the rights of all individuals without exception... I did not feel disheartened or
disorientated, but I was disgusted at certain things, psychologically exhausted
by the Terror and tormented by the mass of wrongs I could see growing, which
I was powerless to counteract.
Source: Viktor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp. 90-4,113-14,153-5.
(E) Emma Goldman, a Russian Anarchist who had lived in the USA for 30 years,
returned to Petrograd in January 1920; but she found it very difieren^ from the
brilliant city she remembered from the 1880s.
It was almost in ruins, as if a hurricane had swept over it. The houses looked
like broken old tombs upon neglected and forgotten cemeteries. The streets
were dirty and deserted; all life had gone from them. The population of Petro
grad before the war was almost two million; in 1920 it had dwindled to five
hundred thousand. The people walked about like living corpses; the shortage
of food and fuel was slowly sapping the city, grim death was clutching at its
heart. Emaciated and frost-bitten men, women and children were being
whipped by the common lash, the search for a piece of bread or a stick of
wood. It was a heart-rending sight by day, and an oppressive weight by night.
The utter stillness of the large city was paralysing. It fairly haunted me,
this awful oppressive silence broken only by occasional shots... the Nevsky
Prospect was lined with young girls selling themselves for a loaf of bread or
a piece of soap or chocolate.
Source: Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia, pp. 8-11.

i
(F) Maxim Gorky, the famous writer and novelist, was a Bolshevik sympathizer
and a friend of Lenin, but he was an outspoken critic of the Terror and the
general culture of violence.
(i) [Letter to Zinoviev protesting about the arrest of academics (March 1919)1
In my view such arrests cannot be justified by any political means. The dis
gusting crimes you have perpetrated in Petersburg during the past few weeks
have brought shame to the regime and aroused universal hatred and contempt
for its cowardice...
(ii) In Tambov province Communists were nailed with railway spikes by their
left hand and left foot to trees a metre above the soil, and they watched the
torments of these deliberately oddly-crucified people. They would open a
prisoner’s belly, take out the small intestine and nailing it to a tree or telegraph
pole they drove the man around the tree with blows, watching the intestine
unwind through the wound...
(iii) [An Appeal to All Honest People, 13 July 1921, printed in the Western press]
Tragedy has come to the country of Tolstoy, Doestoevsky, Mendeleev, Pavlov,
Mussorgsky, Glinka and other world-prized men. If humanitarian ideals and
feelings - faith in whose social import was so shaken by the damnable war and
its victors’ unmercifulness towards the vanquished - if faith in the creative
force of these ideas and feelings, I say, must and can be restored, Russia’s mis
fortune offers a splendid opportunity to demonstrate the vitality of humani-
tarianism. I ask all honest European and American people for prompt aid to
the Russian people. Give bread and medicine. Maxim Gorky.
Source: quoted in Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 648,775,778.
(G) Lenin’s secret orders to the members of the Politburo, 19 March 1922, urging
them to launch an attack on the Orthodox Church.
Precisely now and only now, when they are eating human flesh in the famine
regions and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are lying on the road, we can
(and therefore must) carry out the seizure of church valuables with the most
desperate and the most ruthless energy... In Shuia as many as possible [clergy
men and bourgeois who had demonstrated against the seizure of church prop
erty] must be arrested and put on trial. The trial must end with the shooting of
a very large number of the most influential and dangerous Black Hundreds of
the city of Shuia, and also of Moscow and... other spiritual centres. The more rep
resentatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we manage to
shoot on this occasion, the better. Now is the time to teach those types such a
lesson that for a few dozen years they won’t even be able to think of resistance.
Source: quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (1994 edition), pp. 97-8.

Lenin's ideas for the future
(H) Extracts from Lenin’s article On Co-operation, written in January 1923, in
which he argued that the way forward was to organize the peasants into
co-operative communities. „
All we actually need under NEP is to organize the population of Russia

into co-operative societies on a sufficiently large scale... But it will take
a whole historical epoch to get the entire population into the work of the
co-operatives through NEP. At best we can achieve this in one or two
decades. Nevertheless it will be a distinct historical epoch, and without
this historical epoch, without universal literacy, without a proper degree
of efficiency, without training the population sufficiently to acquire the
habit of book-reading, and without the material basis for this, without
a certain sufficiency to safeguard against, say, bad harvests, famine, etc. -
without this we shall not achieve our object. .. Two main tasks confront
us, which constitute the epoch - to reorganize our machinery of state, which
is utterly useless... and our second task is educational work among the
peasants... But the organization of the entire peasantry in co-operative
societies presupposes a standard of culture among the peasants that
cannot, in fact, be achieved without a cultural revolution.
Source: Robert C. Tucker, The Lenin Anthology, pp. 708-12.
(I) Extracts from Lenin’s last article, Fewer, But Better, dictated in February
1923. It appeared in Pravda on 4 March 1923. It was a criticism of the grow
ing party bureaucracy and therefore of Stalin, but Lenin also speculates
about the final outcome of the world revolutionary process.
Thus, at the present time we are confronted with the question - shall
we be able to hold on with our very small peasant production, and in
our present state of ruin, until the West-European capitalist countries
consummate their development towards socialism? . . . It is only by thor
oughly purging our government machine, by reducing to the utmost
everything that is not absolutely essential in it, that we shall be certain
of being able to keep going . . . Morever we shall be able to keep going
not on the level of a small-peasant country, but on a level steadily advan
cing to large-scale machine industry. These are the lofty tasks that
I dream of . . .
Source: Robert C. Tucker, The Lenin Anthology, pp. 744-6.

* '
An aristocrat’s view of Soviet Russia
(J) Prince Lvov, the former Prime Minister during the 1917 Provisional Govern
ment, gave his impressions in this letter written in November 1923.
Russia has changed completely in the past few years. It has become a com
pletely new Russia. The people and the power are, as usual, two different
things. But Russia more than ever before belongs to the people. To be certain,
the government is hostile to the people and their national feelings, standing as
it does for international goals, it deceives the people and turns them into
slaves, but nonetheless it still receives the support of this oppressed and
enslaved people. They would still defend the regime if it was attacked by an
intervention or by an organization within Russia fighting under the old slogans
or in the name of a restoration... The people supports Soviet power. That
does not mean they are happy with it. But at the same time as they feel their
oppression, they also see that their own type of people are entering into the
apparatus, and this makes them feel that the regime is ‘their own’.
Source: quoted in Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 815-16.
Notes
1. Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: the Russian Revolution 1891-1924, p. 512.
2. O.H. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: the Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly,
1917 (second edition, 1989) for full details.
3. Quoted in Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy (second edition,
1977), p. 87.
4. Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917-21,
pp. 56,127.
5. Figes, Peasant Russia, p. 198.
6. Robert Service, The Russian Revolution, 1900-1927, p. 59.
7. Robert C. Tucker (editor), The Lenin Anthology, pp. 443-4.
8. Ibid., pp. 448-9.
9. Mary McCauley, Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917-22, pp. 27-8,162.
10. Quoted in Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919, p. 574.
11. Quoted in Christopher Hill, Lenin and the Russian Revolution (1971 edition), p. 158.
12. Ibid., p. 96.
13. L.D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin's Russia, pp. 31-2.
14. W.B. Lincoln, Red Victory: A History o f the Russian Civil War, pp. 59-64.
15. Ibid., p. 65.
16. Pipes, pp. 789-93.
17. Gerson, pp. 83, 295,145,159.
18. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 525.
19. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924, p. 112.
20. For a full analysis of the last days of the Romanovs and the testing of the bones see
R.K. Massie, The Romanovs: the Final Chapter. Recently Shay McNeal, in The Plots to
Rescue the Tsar, questions the authenticity of the bones and argues that the Tsar and his
family may have survived after all.
21. Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, p . 364.
22. Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, p. 4.

23. Quoted in Lincoln, pp. 126*7.
24. Mawrcjsley, pp. 181-4.
25. Lincoöi, p. 189.
26. Alec Nove, An Economic History o f the USSR, 1917-1991, p. 68.
27. Lincoln, pp. 325-7.
28. Figes, A People's Tragedy, pp. 656-7; Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, p. 47.
29. Mawdsley, pp. 285-7.
30. Nove, pp. 62,89.
31. Robert C. Tucker, 'Stalinism as Revolution from Above’, in Tucker (editor), Stalinism:
Essays in Historical Interpretation, pp. 90-2.
pp. 220-2,289.
33. Adam B. Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, p. 610.
34. Nove, p. 40; for a detailed analysis of the debate, see pp. 39-77.
35. Quoted in Figes, A People 's Tragedy, pp. 767-8.
36. Israel Getzler, Kronstadt 1917-1921, p. 258. See pp. 205-258 for a full account of the 1921 rising.
37. Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, volume 3, The Iron Ring, p. 169.
38. Robert C. Tucker (editor), The Lenin Anthology, pp. 520-2.
39. Quoted in Figes, A People's Tragedy, pp. 769-70; Service, Lenin: The Iron Ring, p. 216.
40. Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences o f Stalinism (1989
edition), pp. 213-14.
41. Nove, statistics from the table on p. 89.
42. Tucker, The Lenin Anthology, p. 494.
43. R.W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation o f Soviet Agriculture, pp. 17,25-7.
44. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin, p. 188. For a full analysis of the nationalities problem see Helene
Carrere d’Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917-1930.
45. Service, The Iron Ring, p. 282.
46. An excellent book which deals with the first phase of Soviet culture is a collection edited
by Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez and Richard Stites, Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and
Order in the Russian Revolution. ' ^„
47. See T.E. O’Connor, The Politics of Soviet Culture, and Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commis
sariat o f Enlightenment: Soviet Organization o f Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky.
48. Ronald G. Suny, The Soviet Experiment, p. 206.
50. Quoted in Dmitri Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall o f the Soviet Empire, pp. 5-Q¡
51. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legend.
52. Robert C. Tucker (editor), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, Introduction to
the Transaction edition (1999), pp. xi-xiL
53. Dmitri Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall o f the Soviet Empire, pp. 8-9,82.
54. Tucker, Stalinism, p. xii
55. Moshe Lewin, The Making o f the Soviet System, pp. 205-6.
56. Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1891-1919, p. 350.
58. Service, The Iron Ring, pp. xiii-xix; Lenin: A Biography, p. 494.
59. Stephen F. Cohen, 'Bolshevism and Stalinism’, in Tucker (editor), Stalinism: Essays in
Historical Interpretation, p. 12.
61. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 251.
62. Suny, The Soviet Experiment, p. xiv.
i
u 6 Stalin in control - Russia
transformed
Summary of events
After Lenin had suffered a second stroke in December 1922, it became clear that
he was unlikely to be able to remain in control. He gave no positive suggestions
as to who might succeed him, except that it should not be Stalin. Trotsky seemed
the most obvious candidate, but he was unpopular with the other leading members
of the communist party. During the final year of Lenin’s life, Kamenev, Zinoviev
and Stalin concentrated on trying to block Trotsky; Lenin’s criticisms of Stalin
were ignored and his attempts to have Stalin demoted failed. After Lenin's death
in January 1924, Stalin skilfully outmanoeuvred his rivals, expelling them from
the party one by one, until by 1929 he was the unchallenged leader. He
remained in control right through the Second World War and until his death in
1953 at the age of 73.
Under Stalin’s leadership Russia was transformed almost out of recognition:
• By 1929 the idea of world revolution had been abandoned and the communist
aim was to consolidate socialism in the USSR - the concept of ’socialism in
one country*.
• Stalin’s great goal now was to transform the USSR into a leading industrial
and military power so that it would be possible to withstand any attack which
might be launched against it by the capitalist West. This programme would
need massive investment, which Stalin hoped to finance with profits from
agriculture.
• Collectivization of agriculture completed by 1936. Stalin thought that the key
to success was to increase agricultural efficiency and output by putting an end
to Lenin’s NEP and introducing collective farms. There was resistance from
the better-off peasants, but Stalin had no hesitation in pushing the collect
ivization programme through by brute force. In many ways it was a disaster -
millions of peasants died, and grain and meat production did not recover until
the end of the 1930s. From Stalin’s point of view though, it meant that the
countryside was now under government control for the first time; agricultural
output, though much reduced in the early years of collectivization, was at the
disposal of the government, not the peasants.
Stalin in control 193

• The Five-Year Plans for industry, 1928-41. Meanwhile the industrial modem-
ization*programme went ahead with the implementation of three Five-Year
Plans between 1928 and 1941; all three were said to have been successful and
their targets achieved early. But again, as in the case of collectivization, indus
trial progress was achieved only at great human cost - regimentation of the
workers became the order of the day, and living standards deteriorated.
• 1934 - The Purges begin. Many of the Old Bolsheviks disagreed with Stalin’s
policies - particularly the speed of industrialization and the harsh treatment
of peasants and industrial workers. However, Stalin was determined to elim
inate all critics and opponents. Beginning in 1934, he embarked on what
became known as ‘the Purges’: hundreds were arrested and forced to appear
in ‘show-trials' in which they were invariably found guilty of ‘plotting against
the Soviet state', and sentenced to death or imprisonment in labour camps.
The army leadership was .purged. Some estimates put the number of those
who disappeared during the 1930s as high as ten million. All possible alter
native leaders were eliminated and the ordinary population was terrorized
into obedience.
• 1936 - A new constitution introduced. This had some appearance of democ
racy, but in reality it merely underlined the fact that Stalin and the communist
party ran everything. The freedom of artists, writers, musicians and film pro
ducers was severely restricted; everybody was expected to produce works of
‘socialist realism' glorifying Soviet achievements, and anyone who did not
conform was soon ‘purged'.
By June 1941 when the USSR was forced into the Second World War by the
German invasion, a huge gulf had opened up between the visionary ideals and
expectations of the original 1917 Bolshevik revolutionaries and the dismal real
ities of Stalinism.
• If Stalin was a ‘grey blur', how did he succeed in getting to supreme

power?
• Were there genuine policy disagreements among the communist leaders
between 1924 and 1929, or were the disputes caused by struggles for
power?
• Was Stalinism a distortion of Marxism-Leninism or its natural offspring?
• Was there an alternative to Stalin's policy of forced collectivization?
• Was Stalin's subjection of the countryside to the state a substitute for the
process of capital formation which might have been expected to precede
the expansion of heavy industry?
• Was Stalinism simply a ‘revolution from above' or did it have popular
support?
• Was the Stalinist system totalitarian?

6.1 Trotsky or Stalin? The struggle for power
after Lenin's death
(a) Stalin - the least likely leadership candidate
There were five main contenders to take over the leadership of the party and the
country, although at first they all denied that they were interested. They claimed
that nobody could adequately replace Lenin, and talked about a collective
leadership. However, for most of 1923 they all seemed to be manoeuvring for
position. The obvious candidate was Trotsky - viewed by many people as Lenin's
second-in-command and right-hand man. Other possibilities were the 'old'
Bolsheviks Kamenev (head of the Moscow party organization) and Zinoviev
(head of the Leningrad party organization and the Comintern), and Bukharin,
the rising intellectual star of the party. The vast majority of people at the time felt
that the least likely candidate for the leadership was Stalin. Of the Politburo
members, he was the least known to the general public, and in some ways was an
outsider. Bom in 1879 in Georgia, of poor parents - his father was a shoemaker
who had been a serf - Joseph Djugashvili was educated for four years at Tiflis
Theological Seminary, since his mother wanted him to be a priest. He hated its
repressive atmosphere and was expelled in 1899 for spreading socialist ideas. He
had joined the Bolsheviks in 1904 and eventually took the surname Stalin - man
of steel. He gained a reputation as an outstanding administrator, but although
his job as Party General Secretary meant that he was head of the party bureau
cracy, it also meant that he was not greatly in the public eye. In 1925 when
a series of ten postcards entitled ‘Leaders of October’ was published to mark the
eighth anniversary of the revolution, Stalin was not included.1
Stalin seemed to have none of the characteristics normally expected of a great
leader: he had nothing like the charisma of Lenin and Trotsky, all his rivals were
better public speakers than he was, he was not a war hero, and he was certainly
nowhere near the intellectual equal of Trotsky or Bukharin. The Menshevik
Nikolai Sukhanov wrote in his memoirs that ‘in the political arena Stalin was noth
ing more than a vague, grey blur;’ Trotsky was devastating about him, describing
him as ‘the Party’s most eminent mediocrity... his mind is devoid of creative
imagination... a man destined to play second or third fiddle.’
By the end of 1922 Lenin had turned against Stalin after a number of dis
agreements, even though he recognized his great abilities. Lenin was critical of
Stalin’s handling of the Georgian problem, and Stalin accused Lenin of being
‘soft on the nationalities’ (see section 5.8(d)). Lenin felt that the party bureau
cracy was becoming too big and unwieldy and wanted the state and party organ
izations to be kept separate; Stalin of course approved of the party dominating
the government structures because of the enormous personal power that he had
built up within the party machine. In December 1922 Lenin dictated a document
which became known as his political testament. In it he reviewed the qualities of
his possible successors, and was unable to summon up much enthusiasm for any
of them. Stalin as General Secretary, he said, ‘has concentrated unlimited power
in his hands, and I am not convinced that he will always manage to use this
power with sufficient caution.' Trotsky, he admitted, was extremely able; ‘he is

distinguished not only by hiS'outstanding talents. To be sure, he is personally the
most capable person in the present Central Committee - but he also over-brims
with self-confidence and with an excessive preoccupation with the purely
administrative side of things.’ Lenin was afraid, with good reason in view of their
long history of mutual hostility, that Stalin and Trotsky would fall out and cause a
split in the party. The party must therefore take measures to prevent such a split
taking place. As for Kamenev and Zinoviev, Lenin had very little to say except to
give a reminder of ‘the October episode’ in 1917, when they had both disagreed
with him about whether or not the time was right to seize power.
A few days later, on 4 January 1923, Lenin dictated a postscript to the political
testament, after discovering that Stalin had spoken abruptly and rudely on the
telephone to Nadezdha Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife. This was evidently the last straw
for Lenin and he made up his mind that Stalin must be removed from his power
ful position: ‘Stalin is too crude, and this defect which is entirely acceptable in
our milieu and in relationships among us as communists, becomes unacceptable
in the position of General Secretary. I therefore propose to comrades that they
should devise a means of removing him from this job and should appoint to this
job someone else who is distinguished from comrade Stalin in all other respects
only by the single superior aspect that he should be more tolerant, more polite
and more attentive towards comrades, less capricious etc.'2 At this point,
however, the political testament was not made public. It was headed ‘Letter to
the Congress’, and Lenin presumably intended it to be read out at the Twelfth
Party Congress later in 1923, with the aim of having Stalin voted out of office.
However, with Lenin’s worsening health and his death, it did not become public
until the Thirteenth Congress in 1924, when the party leaders, meeting in private,
decided to ignore it.
More public was Lenin’s article published in Pravda (Truth) on 25 January
1923, in which he criticized the People’s Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants’
Inspection (known as Rabkrin), a body of which Stalin had been the head since it
was set up in 1919 until April 1922. It was an organization which had the power to
go into all government institutions and look at their records to make sure that the
'experts’ and the bureaucracy were doing their jobs properly. It had never func
tioned very efficiently and Lenin had often criticized its work, though without
actually blaming Stalin. The January Pravda article, entitled How We Should
Reorganize the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, was widely interpreted as an
attack on Stalin. Lenin sent a letter to Trotsky asking him to lead the attack on
Stalin at the party Congress over his handling of the Georgian affair. Sadly, Trotsky
proved unequal to the task and the opposition to Stalin remained fragmented.
(b) Trotsky’s failure

Charged with leading the attack on Stalin, Trotsky was strangely half-hearted and
ineffectual. In spite of having Lenin's full authority behind him, Trotsky did
nothing at all about attacking Stalin over his handling of the Georgian question;
in fact he even failed to attend the meetings of the Party Congress in 1923 when
the Georgian issue was being discussed. Adam Ulam suggested that the reason
for this was that Trotsky still saw Zinoviev as his chief rival, and to discredit Stalin
196 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rihsian History

would only increase Zinoviev's chances of taking over Lenin's position.3A similar
thing happened in May 1924 with regard to Lenin's political testament; this was
considered by the Central Committee, and when Lenin's criticism of Stalin was
read out, Stalin seemed devastated and offered to resign. However, Kamenev and
Zinoviev spoke up in defence of Stalin, arguing that he had made amends for any
earlier misdemeanours; there was no need to have him replaced as Party General
Secretary, and they 'persuaded' him to withdraw his resignation. It was also
agreed that the testament should be kept secret; and although a version of it
appeared in The New York Times in 1926, it was not published in Russia until
after Stalin’s death. Kamenev and Zinoviev acted in this way because they were
afraid of Trotsky and were determined to prevent him from becoming leader.
They were extremely ambitious themselves, and ironically they did not perceive
Stalin as a danger; they seem to have expected him to continue quietly with his
work as General Secretary, leaving the two of them in the top positions. Trotsky
went along with all these decisions, and in fact uttered not a word at the Central
Committee meeting; these two incidents were his last chances to attack Stalin
with the backing of Lenin.
What were the reasons for this apparently limp reaction? The most obvious
one is that by May 1924 Trotsky was extremely unpopular with the rest of the
party leadership and knew that he had no chance of winning the argument. Isaac
Deutscher described Trotsky’s attitude as one of 'moody aloofness’, caused
partly by a recent illness and partly because he knew full well that ‘the tide was
running against him’. He did not covet personal power and ‘in his whole being
he shrank from the scramble.’4There is evidence that he told Lenin the day after
the Bolshevik seizure of power that he would never accept the leadership of
the country because he knew that the fact that he was Jewish would arouse a lot
of opposition in some quarters. Martin McCauley comments on how often, dur
ing this period after the death of Lenin, Trotsky was ill at critical moments when
he needed to be on top form, and suggests that the illnesses may have been
psychosomatic.5
Trotsky’s unpopularity with the most influential of the leading Bolsheviks
greatly reduced his chances of success. Many could not forget that he had only
joined the party at the last minute shortly before the October revolution; others
were jealous that he rose to the top so quickly after joining so late. Although he
had support among students and former students, and in the Red Army, he was
not popular with industrial workers who remembered his advocacy of strict
military discipline for workers. He could be extremely arrogant: he often treated
Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin with condescension and even contempt He made
himself more unpopular by some of his actions during Lenin’s illness, which
showed an odd lack of political skill and sensitivity. In October 1923 for example,
during the ‘scissors crisis’ (see section 5.6(e)), he launched a bitter attack on the
party leadership, which in effect meant Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, who were
acting as a triumvirate during Lenin's illness. Trotsky was supported by a group
of Bolsheviks who had signed what they called the ‘Platform of 46'. Their
criticisms of the leadership were that there was no plan for the future of the
revolution, no vision; Trotsky claimed that military methods were the way
forward in both industry and agriculture, criticized the lack of democracy in the

party and accused the Secretariat of amassing too much power. An augmented
meeting of the Central Committee condemned Trotsky, who was supported by
only two out of the 114 members who took part.
In October 1924 Trotsky published a book called The Lessons of October in
which he criticized Zinoviev and Kamenev over their disagreements with Lenin
about the timing of the October revolution; this outraged the other Politburo
members who responded angrily. Bukharin wrote an article attacking Trotsky's
version of events, entitled How Not to Write the History of October 1917. Kamenev
produced the most devastating reply in an article in Pravda in November 1924.
He said that Trotsky had always in reality been a Menshevik, and he quoted from
letters written by Trotsky in 1913, in which he condemned the whole foundation
of Leninism as being 'built on lying and falsification', and went on to call Lenin
‘a professional exploiter of all that is backward in the Russian workers’ movement.’
Stalin also defended Kamenev and Zinoviev - their disagreement with Lenin in
October 1917 was only a passing aberration that was over in a few days. 'Why
does Trotsky have to keep dragging the party backwards to new debates?’ Stalin
asked in one of his speeches. ‘What is the meaning, the point of this, when the
party does not want to debate, when the party is overloaded with pressing tasks,
when the party needs united work to restore the economy? The motivation is that
Trotsky is making another (yet another!) attempt to substitute Trotskyism for
Leninism.’6 Stalin went on to orchestrate a press campaign against Trotsky who
reacted by having a sort of breakdown and failing to defend himself. Several
historians have commented on Trotsky’s poor timing; Dmitri Volkogonov points
out that Trotsky had a strange habit of starting up every discussion at a time least
favourable to himself, so that he must have known in advance that he would be
defeated.7 The conclusions to be drawn are either that deep down, he did not
want the leadership, or that, if he did want the leadership, he was so overbear
ingly arrogant that he totally underestimated Stalin’s political abilities. Whatever
Trotsky’s true motives, the reality was that by the end of 1924 almpst all his
support had disappeared. In January 1925 he was more or less forced to resign as
Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, and Zinoviev even tried to persuade
the others to expel Trotsky from the party. Ironically it was Stalin, taking a stand
as a moderate, who was responsible for the defeat of this proposal, and it was the
votes of Stalin and his friends which kept Trotsky as a member of the Politburo.
In spite of that, however, it was clear that Trotsky was finished as a contender
for supreme power.
(c) Stalin triumphant

Stalin was appointed to the new post of Party General Secretary in April 1922,
apparently at the instigation of Lenin and Kamenev; two of Stalin’s allies - Molotov
and Kuibyshev - were appointed as secretaries. Stalin was able to use his position
to build up enormous personal influence. One of his major jobs was to appoint
the secretaries of local Communist Party organizations, and he also had the
power to dismiss them. He quietly filled these positions with his supporters and
gained control over the local parties. These local organizations chose the delegates
to national Party Conferences, and so the Party Conferences gradually filled with
• '
Stalin supporters. The Party Congresses elected the Party Central Committee and
the Politburo; as the 1920s progressed, all the top bodies and congresses became
more and more packed with people who supported Stalin, so that by 1928 he was
unassailable. In many ways Stalin was lucky: if Lenin’s health had held out for
another year, it is almost certain that Stalin would have been removed from the
post. The death of Dzerzhinsky (head of the Cheka and VSNKh) in 1926 opened
the way for Kuibyshev, one of Stalin’s closest allies, to be appointed in his place.
And Stalin was fortunate too that his other two rivals, Kamenev and Zinoviev,
both had serious weaknesses: they were good team members but lacked leader
ship qualities, and their political judgement was suspect - for a long time they
were so busy attacking Trotsky that they failed to recognize the reed danger from
Stalin and missed several opportunities to get rid of him.
Although he could never be described as an intellectual, Stalin nevertheless
had great political skill and intuition. He had the ability to cut through the complex
ities of a problem and focus on the essentials. He was always careful to present
himself as the pupil and dedicated follower of Lenin, whereas Trotsky, Kamenev
and Zinoviev considered themselves more as Lenin’s equals. Stalin was an excellent
judge of character and had the gift of being able to work out people’s weaknesses
and then exploit them to maximum effect. He was adept at using disagreements
over policy in the Politburo in order to side with one faction against another,
eliminating his rivals one by one until he was left supreme.8 His manoeuvrings
fell into four phases:
1922-25 Stalin sided with Kamenev and Zinoviev against Trotsky, mainly over
Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’. Both Lenin and Trotsky believed
passionately that the lasting success of the revolution in Russia depended on the
spread of revolution world-wide. Trotsky wanted Russia to continue to do every
thing in its power to spread the revolution. In opposition to this Stalin put
forward the theory of ‘socialism in one country’. Stalin had picked up the idea
from an article by Bukharin, and he proceeded to develop it. Socialism, he
argued, must be firmly established in Russia first, and Russia’s economic and
military strength must be built up so that she could defend herself against the
inevitable capitalist attacks which would come sooner or later. Only when Russia
was strong enough would it be realistic to think of carrying the campaign of
revolution to the rest of the world. This was a genuine policy disagreement, but
there was also the personal rivalry element. Hostility between Stalin and Trotsky
went back as far as the Civil War when Trotsky was Commissar for War and Stalin
was in charge of the defences of Tsaritsyn (later called Stalingrad). Trotsky
thought that Stalin was too independent and asked Lenin to dismiss him. Lenin
recalled Stalin to Moscow to explain himself, and Stalin never forgave Trotsky for
this humiliation. Trotsky’s rivalry with Kamenev and Zinoviev was less bitter, but
they both resented his arrogance and his criticism of them. This phase ended, as
we saw, in January 1925 with Trotsky’s isolation and his resignation from his post
of Commissar for Military Affairs.
1925-26 With Trotsky safely out of the running, Stalin now began to turn
against Kamenev and Zinoviev. There were a number of policy debates going on

in the Politburo. Should NEP be continued? Should they press ahead with rapid
industrialization? Should they stick with Stalin’s ’socialism in one country’?
Although NEP was a success in many ways, there was still a problem with insuf
ficient grain supplies reaching the cities. Nikolai Bukharin, who was now on the
right of the party (he had been a Left Communist and had supported War Com
munism during the Civil War) emerged as the champion of NEP. He was in
favour of encouraging the peasants to produce more by giving them more
concessions; in fact he wanted an intensification of NEP. In a speech in April
1925 Bukharin exhorted the peasants: ‘We must say to the whole peasantry, to all
its strata: enrich yourselves, accumulate, develop your economy.’ In theory the
whole economy of the state would benefit: there would be a great improvement
in agricultural productivity and peasants’ incomes would increase correspond
ingly, enabling them to buy more consumer goods; this, together with the
increased demand for agricultural machinery, would stimulate industry. At this
stage Stalin supported Bukharin’s policy which was in operation from 1923 right
through to 1926. The 1925 harvest was an excellent one, probably the best since
1917, and this seemed to vindicate the Bukharin-Stalin policy.
However, Kamenev and Zinoviev, known as the Left Opposition, vigorously
opposed Bukharin and Stalin, feeling that their policy was favouring peasants at
the expense of industrial workers. Both men had their power bases and main
support in industrial areas and feared that they would lose popularity if
Bukharin’s policy continued. More concessions to peasants would mean moving
too far away from socialism in the direction of capitalism; if this trend continued,
it would never be possible to return to strict Marxism. Zinoviev began a series of
speeches criticizing Bukharin; he demanded that there should be no mofe-con-
cessions to the peasants and that rapid industrialization should be made the top
priority. He even attacked the theory of ‘socialism in one country’. Many saw this
as Zinoviev's bid for the leadership - belatedly he and Kamenev had wakened up
to the danger from Stalin. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925
Kamenev delivered a blistering speech criticizing Stalin personally for the first
time: ‘We are against creating the theory of a leader... we think it is harmful to
the Party to prolong a situation in which the Secretariat combines politics and
organization, and, in fact, decides policy in advance... I have reached the conclu
sion that Comrade Stalin cannot perform the function of uniting the Bolshevik
general staff.’ But it was all too late to damage Stalin; the Left Opposition could
muster only 64 votes against 559 who voted for Stalin and Bukharin. In the elec
tions for the Politburo (whose membership was increased from seven to nine),
Kamenev was voted off and the three new members were Molotov, Kalinin and
Voroshilov - all close allies of Stalin. Although Zinoviev remained a member of
the Politburo, within a few weeks he had been voted out of his position as head of
the Leningrad party organization. He was replaced by another Stalin supporter,
Sergei Kirov.
1926-27 This third phase of events saw the unlikely alliance of Kamenev and
Zinoviev with Trotsky, the man they had tried to get expelled from the party only
two years earlier; it was a last desperate attempt to defeat Stalin. Calling them
selves ‘The United Opposition’, in July 1926 they issued the ‘Declaration of the
i v
Thirteen’ in which they continued to criticize the government’s ’soft' policy
towards the kulaks and insisted that NEP could not be relied on to produce suf
ficient grain. They also criticized ’socialism in one country’ as being far too
narrow - communism should be international. Again they called for a speeding-
up of industrialization so that workers’ conditions and wages could be improved.
Stalin cunningly turned the opposition’s arguments against thèm. He pointed
out that Trotsky’s support for ’permanent revolution’ rather than ’socialism in
one country' proved that he cared more for foreign countries than he did for
Russia; Trotsky therefore was a traitor! Stalin also emphasized that he wanted
rapid industrialization just as much as Trotsky did; he accused Trotsky of being
insincere in his concern for industrial workers, raking up Trotsky’s earlier policy
of strict military discipline for workers. When the United Opposition persisted in
their campaign Stalin accused them of factionalism - a breach of party discipline.
Trotsky called Stalin ‘the gravedigger of the revolution.’ Trotsky and Zinoviev, as
members of the Politburo, were severely reprimanded, expelled from the Central
Committee of the Party (October 1927), and expelled from the party itself the
following month, along with 25 other members of the Left Opposition, including
Kamenev. Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, where he
stayed for a year before being expelled to Istanbul in Turkey. Kamenev and
Zinoviev later confessed that their views were anti-Leninist and recanted; they
were allowed back into the party. The Left Opposition was finished; Stalin and
Bukharin were now supreme.
1928-29 In this final phase of Stalin’s triumphant rise to supreme power he

made a dramatic policy change: in some areas in the spring of 1928 he suddenly
launched campaigns to seize grain by force. Bukharin, the great advocate of NEP,
and his supporters, could not go along with this, and so found themselves in
opposition to Stalin - the Right Opposition. To be fair to Stalin, it does seem to
have been a genuine policy decision, not just a ploy to eliminate the Right. The
problem was that NEP had run into serious crisis; the 1927 harvest had been dis
appointing. Peasants felt that the grain prices being offered by the government
were too low, so they withheld their grain and sold meat, vegetables and dairy
produce instead. By the time the Party Congress met in December 1927 there
were already food shortages in the cities. The Congress accepted that more pres
sure would have to be exerted on the peasants, that Lenin’s idea of co-operatives
was the way forward, but that these must be introduced without coercion. Even
Bukharin was prepared to go along with this; Stalin himself spoke in favour of
a cautious approach, and Molotov followed the same line, rejecting the idea of
grain confiscations: coercion, he said, was inadmissible; ‘whoever tells us to
apply a policy of compulsory extraction of two to four million tons of grain...
then that person is an enemy of the workers and peasants, however well inten-
tioned his proposal.’9
In January 1928 Stalin paid a visit to the Urals and Siberia to investigate for
himself why grain supplies from these areas were dwindling.10 While he was
there, on his own initiative and without consulting any of his colleagues, he
began to order grain requisitioning. Gradually over the next few months this
policy was extended to most parts of Russia, not by order of the Politburo, but on

Stalin’s orders given to local party secretaries. Already he was acting as a dictator;
over the next two years all aspects of NEP were phased out, with the use of force
whenever necessary (for a full explanation of the abandonment of NEP and
Stalin’s agricultural policies see section 6.2). This provoked intense opposition
from Bukharin and his allies, Rykov and Tomsky, now known as the Right
Opposition. They claimed that Stalin was exaggerating the danger from the
kulaks and they deplored the use of violence. For a time it seemed as though
Bukharin might be gaining the advantage - Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were all
members of the Politburo, Bukharin was greatly respected in the Party, he was
popular, he was the editor of Pravda and he genuinely believed that his policy -
to continue NEP ‘for the foreseeable future' (Lenin’s phrase) - was what Lenin
himself would have wanted. But there was also considerable support for Stalin
from communists who had no patience with wealthy peasants. By April 1929 the
Right Opposition were also Criticizing the breakneck pace of Stalin’s First Five-
Year Plan for industry (1929-32) which was well underway (see section 6.4). Stalin
responded by quietly removing Bukharin supporters from their posts all over
Russia and replacing them with his own allies. In November 1929 Stalin delivered
a scathing three-hour speech, full of sarcasm and insults directed against
Bukharin, and shortly afterwards Bukharin was voted off the Politburo. The Right
Opposition was crushed and Stalin was the undisputed ruler of the USSR.
It was an astonishing achievement that the most obscure and apparently least
gifted of the Bolshevik leaders should reach this position. Stalin's rise to power
was made possible through a combination of his control of the Party Secretariat,
his own political skill and ruthlessness, the weaknesses of his opponents mid
a certain amount of good fortune. One of his most successful devices was con
stantly identifying his own views with those of Lenin, which made it difficult for
anybody to win an argument against Stalin without appearing to criticize Lenin.
Robert Service believes that most of Stalin’s biographers, including Dmitri
Volkogonov, have failed to emphasize another important factor, that Stalin’s
policies were actually popular with a majority of party members. The Lenin
Enrolment of 1924 brought a quarter of a million new members, almost all of
them workers, into the party. Many of these new members soon began to be
promoted into the management and the ever-growing party bureaucracy and so
became part of the Bolshevik political culture. These people were doing well and
rising in the social scale; they enjoyed their new-found power in society and saw
Stalin as the leader most likely to enable them to continue. Service argues that
most officials were impatient with the problems caused by NEP - the constantly
recurring crises over food supplies to the towns, the mass unemployment in
industrial areas, and the wealthy peasants blocking the progress to socialism.
Unless a modern economy could be developed quickly, the USSR might collapse
and their influential positions would be lost. The inclinations of Bolsheviks at all
levels of the party therefore coincided with Stalin’s inclinations in the late 1920s:
‘a wish to complete the revolution at home, to suppress opposition both outside
and inside the party, to build a strong centralist state, to promote working-class
Bolsheviks into positions of power, and to settle accounts with the "bourgeois
specialists".’11 »
I V
\
Historians have speculated about the point at which Stalin began to think in
terms of becoming supreme leader. Had he planned his every move from the
time Lenin first became ill in 1922 or even earlier? Or did it only dawn on him
later that events might move in his favour if he played his cards correcdy? It is
impossible to be sure even now, since Stalin kept his innermost thoughts to
himself. What does seem clear is that when he did change his policies, it was not
simply for his own personal advantage - there were always good political or eco
nomic reasons as well. As Ronald Suny puts it: ‘for Stalin, as for many politicians,
personal power and political goals were complexly intertwined, and he probably
saw little contradiction between what was good for him personally and what was
good for the country.’12
6.2 The end of the New Economic Policy: why was

it abandoned?
(a) Failures in agricultural policy
Although the NEP had been moderately successful for the first few years, by 1927
it seemed to be faltering and the results were disappointing. Whether this was
because of inherent weaknesses within the NEP or whether it was because the
government did not pursue it efficiently enough is still debatable. Certainly food
production seemed to have reached an upper limit which was still well below the
amounts produced and marketed in 1913 - and this to feed a population which
was growing by at least two per cent per annum. Critics blamed this failure on
the division of the land into large numbers of tiny uneconomic farms, and the
continuing use of old-fashioned farming methods. But the situation was made
worse by the government’s policy of paying low prices for grain procurements;
this was a deliberate ploy because the government wanted a price policy which
ran counter to market forces. But it was fatal for hopes of increasing grain mar
ketings - in the year 1926-27 the general level of agricultural procurement prices
fell by about six per cent from the previous year, but grain prices on offer fell by
as much as 25 per cent in some areas. Sometimes these prices were so low that
they failed to cover the cost of production, and there was no incentive for peas
ants to try and produce more grain. Many concentrated on livestock and other
crops, for which the prices were better, and they held on to their grain and sold it
later for a better price to private traders (known as Nepmen) who were still legal.
By December 1927 when the Fifteenth Party Congress met, the food situation
had reached crisis-point, although the Stalinists denied that there was a crisis. At
the end of the year the state had bought up only 300 million poods (a pood =
approximately 36 pounds) of grain compared with 428 million a year earlier. The
situation was worst in Siberia, the Urals and the Volga: even though the harvest
had been good in the Urals, grain sales to the state in that area were only 63 per
cent of the previous year's figure; significantly, meat sales had increased by 50
per cent and bacon had quadrupled.13Peasants were waiting and hoping for an
increase in grain prices offered by the state, which had happened in 1925. But
not this time: Stalin was losing patience. Not only were there bread shortages in

the big cities» even peasants in non-food producing areas were feeling the pinch;
for example, the cotton-growers of Uzbekistan in Central Asia were short of food.
It was against this background that in January 1928, Stalin himself, accompanied
by a large posse of officials, travelled to the Urals and Siberia and personally
ordered military-style operations against peasants. Free markets were closed and
private traders - Nepmen - were banned; peasants were ordered to deliver their
grain and were arrested if they failed to do so. Offenders could be sentenced to
three years in jail if convicted of hoarding grain. Stalin was harsh with local party
officials, blaming them for allowing the ‘kulak gentry' to get away with ‘specula
tion', and telling them that private farming in the villages could not go on like
this indefinitely. Other senior officials organized similar campaigns in other
areas, and this sort of operation became known as the ‘Urals-Siberian method’.
The government claimed that these measures had originated from local initi
atives and would not admit publicly that NEP had been abandoned. But Stalin
and his supporters had clearly decided by the spring of 1928 that NEP was no
longer a viable policy.
Some historians believe that NEP could have been much more successful in
the agricultural sphere if only the government had made more of an effort to
make it work. Lenin and Bukharin believed that the second stage of NEP should
involve the state encouraging and educating the peasants (see section 5.6(d)) to
prepare them for working together in agrarian co-operatives. However, there was
litde sign of encouragement or education of the peasants in the mid-1920s. The
government’s low-price policy was a disaster and almost destroyed the incentive
to produce and market more grain. There were already several thousand state-
owned (sovkhozy) and privately-owned collective farms (kolkhozy) in existence,
but the government neglected them completely and they were not successful. If
the state had encouraged and supported them, their output was bound to have
increased and the crisis of 1927-28 may have been avoided. Instead, as Moshe
Lewin points out, ‘the leadership seemed to be relying on NEP tq function
“automatically"... and gave very litde thought to any preparation of alternative
policies. The responsibility for this blindness must lie with Stalin, as well as with
those of the future right. Their absorption with the struggle against the left
cannot obscure the fact that the administration was guilty of a lack of foresight
and perspicacity.’14
(b) Industrial failures

However, it wasn’t only in the agricultural sphere that NEP turned out to be
disappointing. Although by 1926 industrial output had recovered generally to
around or just below its 1913 levels (see section 5.6(e)), it had somehow failed to
make a great leap forward. The labour force seemed to be available - in fact there
was a high level of unemployment; but what seemed to be lacking was planning
and above all finance. There could be no life-saving French loans and investment
now - no capitalist country would invest in a communist state which until
recently had been trying to spread world revolution. Yet all the party leaders
agreed that rapid industrialization was vital; the only disagreement was about
the pace of the expansion - how ‘rapid’ should it be? In October 1925 Stalin
» «

announced that the government had decided to push ahead with a programme
of industrialization based on a Five-Year Plan (although this did not actually
begin until October 1928). His new slogan was ‘socialism in one country'. This
was an acknowledgment that revolutions elsewhere in the world were unlikely and
that consequently the USSR would have to rely on its own strength for survival.
The USSR must catch up with the Western countries as quickly as possible, so
there must be a great drive to expand and modernize heavy industry - metal
lurgy, coal and machinery. A fully industrialized USSR would dissuade the cap
italist powers from attacking, and if they did presume to intervene, a Soviet
victory would be much more likely.
Stalin appeared to take the threat of war seriously, especially at the time of the
famous ‘war-scare’ crisis in 1927. First of all, in April, Soviet relations with China
took a disastrous turn. China was in the grip of a civil war in which the nationalist
Kuomintang (KMT) party led by General Chiang Kai-shek, were trying to estab
lish control. The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921, co-operated with
the KMT, and both received support and encouragement from Moscow. How
ever, as Chiang Kai-shek gradually gained control over more and more of China,
he decided he could do without the help of the communists. He began to see
them as potentially dangerous rivals and decided to destroy them. In April 1927
the attack began - thousands of communists were arrested, a workers’ rebellion
in Shanghai was brutally suppressed and a terrible ‘purification movement’ was
launched in which thousands of communists, trade union leaders and peasants
were massacred; some estimates put the total number of deaths as high as a
quarter of a million. The Chinese nationalists seized the Chinese Eastern Rail
road which, it had been agreed, would be managed jointly by the Chinese and
Russians. The Russian government hurriedly brought all the Soviet advisers in
China back home, and the Chinese broke off diplomatic relations with the USSR.
This was a bitter blow for Stalin who had pressed the policy of co-operation with
Chiang Kai-shek, against the advice of Trotsky. In May 1927 Britain broke off
diplomatic relations with the USSR after police raided the premises of Arcos,
a Russian trading organization in London. The police claimed to have found
evidence that Russian agents were trying to stir up revolution in Britain. In June
the Soviet ambassador in Poland was assassinated; and in addition to all this bad
news there was evidence of deepening Japanese involvement in Manchuria,
a further threat to Russian interests in the Far East.
Although the situation might have seemed serious, there was no real danger of
war at that point, as Stalin’s Foreign Minister, Chicherin, assured him. But Stalin
chose to exaggerate the fears in order to strengthen his case for rapid industrial
ization - there was no time to lose! He also used the ‘scare’ to justify a tougher
policy against opponents and ‘enemies' at home. One of the first manifestations
of the new approach, apart from the grain procurement campaigns against the
peasants, were the Shakhty trials. In March 1928 it was announced that a group
of about 50 engineers, including some Germans, in the Shakhty region of the
Donbass in the Ukraine, were to be put on trial for deliberate sabotage of the
mining industry and for conspiring with foreign capitalist powers. It was said to
be a counter-revolutionary plot. The trials, reported every day in the press through
out May and June, were a complete travesty. The accused, some of whom had

been beaten or tortured, were forced to make false confessions. They were all
found guilty, five were shot and most of the others were given long prison sen
tences. This was the first of the so-called ‘show-trials’ in which the case against
the defendants was based on confessions extracted by torture or threats. Stalin’s
a i m in this instance was to frighten the leaders of industry —economists, man
agers, engineers and ‘experts’ in general - at this time when the government was
preparing to launch its Five-Year Plan for industry. The Shakhty trials were
a warning against experts of all types: to members of the bourgeoisie who might
be tempted to put less than one-hundred per cent effort into making the forth
coming plan a success; to communist experts who worked with ‘old’ experts that
they had better be on guard against the wiles of the class enemies; and to anybody
who felt inclined to criticize the Five-Year Plan on any grounds whatsoever. All
such people now ran the risk of being labelled ‘wreckers’ and ‘saboteurs’, of
being sacked from their jobs and, at worst, of facing trial and execution.
Having softened up the potential opposition, Stalin was ready to launch the
great industrial leap forward in 1929. However, there was still one huge ques
tion-mark: where was the finance coming from to sustain such an intense
programme of expansion over a period of five years? For example, until the Rus
sian machine-tool industry could be expanded, it would be necessary to import
machinery from abroad; but how could this be paid for? This is where the close
links between industry and agriculture became apparent: the only possible
source of cash was from massive exports of grain. This was the crux of the entire
NEP problem: the Russian peasants were required to produce not simply
enough food to feed the rapidly growing population, but enough to finance the
industrial expansion as well. To achieve this they needed to adopt more modem
farming methods; but only the wealthiest peasants could afford, for example, to
buy tractors, which were badly needed and expensive. NEP would clearly have
to go, but as yet Stalin was undecided about what should take its place. Bukharin
and the Right were against any form of coercion being used againstqpeasants
and blamed much of the trouble on Stalin for trying to msh industrialization too
quickly.
(c) Political motives

All these were understandable economic motives for abandoning NEP. But there
were clear political motives too. The Left Communists had believed passionately
from the inception of NEP that it was impossible to justify the permanent
survival of a largely privately-owned system of agriculture in what was intended
to be a socialist state. Even more galling for them was the existence of the wealthy
peasants or kulaks, as Stalin labelled them, who, so it seemed to them, took every
opportunity of holding the country to ransom by hoarding their grain. Many
workers resented the unemployment in industry while, they were told, kulaks
and Nepmen were making big profits. ‘What did we fight for?' was a question
often put during the mid-1920s when it was becoming clear that society as a
whole had not yet been transformed. Stalin encouraged these feelings for all he
was worth; it was vital, he argued, to keep the revolutionary impetus going, to guard
against a revival of the old middle classes; this is what the 1928 Shakhty trial was
i >
really all about. Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky and the Right seemed over-cautious in
comparison, offering only a very gradual change and rejecting all suggestion of
toughness towards the wealthy peasants. The majority feeling in the party was
apparently not one of satisfaction at a job well done. In the words of Sheila
Fitzpatrick, ‘it was a mood of restlessness, dissatisfaction and barely subdued
belligerence and, especially among party youth, nostalgia for the old heroic days
of the Civil War; for a young party still perceiving itself as (in Lenin’s phrase of
1917) “the working class in arms”, peace had perhaps come too soon.’15 For
Stalin, the Left and probably a majority of the party therefore, an attack on those
wealthy peasants they described as kulaks was the best way forward and would
give the party new direction. This policy had the additional advantage, from
Stalin’s point of view, of enabling him to defeat Bukharin and his supporters,
leaving him in supreme control.
6.3 The collectivization of agriculture

(a) The decision taken
Although by the spring of 1928 Stalin had decided that NEP must go, it seems
unlikely that he had any clear idea of what should take its place. The change to
a policy of full collectivization took place only gradually. At first Stalin seemed to
be toying with the idea of developing the kolkhozy and sovkhozy, which, he was
told, could produce four times more from the same area of land than small peas
ant farms. At this stage nobody seemed to be thinking of total collectivization,
and it was expected that a large private sector of farming would remain. During
the three to four years which it could be expected to take before the collectives
reached full capacity, Stalin intended to continue with the grain-requisitioning
campaigns already started, calling it a war against the kulaks. The forces sent out
had orders to seize grain from kulaks and ‘middle peasants’, but it soon became
obvious that many of the ‘middle peasants’ were far from rich. All peasants
resented requisitioning and resisted as best they could, eventually falling back on
their old weapon - they sowed less. The relationship between the Soviet state
and the peasants, which had gradually developed since 1917 into one of at least
mutual tolerance, now broke down. The grain crisis continued, there were bread
shortages in the cities and in February 1929 food rationing was introduced in
some areas. Living standards were falling in industrial areas, and output was
adversely affected. The weak agricultural system was jeopardizing the whole
economy. Bukharin and his supporters reiterated their policies: a return to the
free market for grain and a slow-down in the pace of industrialization. Once
again the majority rejected their suggestions and criticisms and the Right was
soon defeated. It was probably some time in September 1929 that Stalin was
converted to total collectivization. It must have seemed to some of the leaders
that the country was in a real crisis. They wanted an even faster rate of industrial
ization, and they accused the kulaks of trying to sabotage the country's future.
Perhaps what finally convinced Stalin were the encouraging statistics of collective
farm output released in the autumn of 1929: peasants working in collectives, who

were only about five per cent of total peasants, produced fourteen per cent of the
marketable grain. The decision was taken: rapid and total forced collectivization
of all Soviet agriculture.
(b) Was collectivization the only alternative?

For many years most historians did not question the assumption that Stalin had
no choice but to introduce forced collectivization because of the seriousness of
the crisis. Isaac Deutscher claimed that ‘Stalin acted under the overwhelming
pressure of events... he was precipitated into collectivization by the chronic
danger of famine in 1928 and 1929.’16Alexander Gershenkron argued that by the
mid-1920s NEP had become restrictive and that conditions for further economic
growth were therefore unfavourable.17 More recent historians, including Robert
C. Tucker, Moshe Lewin, James R. Millar and Dmitri Volkogonov, believe that
there were alternatives. Lewin argues that agriculture was not exclusively to
blame for the crisis, and that the rate of industrial growth at the time was exces
sive. The First Five-Year Plan (see section 6.4) for industry had ridiculously high
targets which involved a great wastage of scarce resources and a forcing of the
pace, which put an enormous strain on agriculture. The obvious alternative was
to have started the industrialization programme much earlier so that it could
have been pursued at a more modest pace, with, in the end, results which were
just as impressive. The concept of the mixed private sector and state-collective
sector was another perfectly viable alternative which was neglected by the
regime. There were already several thousand kolkhozy and sovkhozy in existence
in 1929. Kolkhozy were collective farms in which members farmed the land as
a co-operative and were allowed a small private plot. Wages were paid at the end
of the harvest, though if the farm failed to make a profit, no wages would be paid.
In 1928 the government defined a ‘large’ kolkhoz as one with a sown area of 2000
hectares (one hectare = two and a half acres). Sovkhozy were state-owped col
lective farms, directed by the state and usually formed to bring previously virgin
land under cultivation. They were looked on as grain factories and members
were treated as industrial workers with a guaranteed minimum wage and social
benefits. The first sovkhoz, started in 1928, was a huge one of 41,000 hectares in
the Northern Caucasus.
There were also examples of spontaneous co-operative movements already
taking place in the villages; these included ‘simple producers' associations' and
a kind of voluntary collectivized form of organization known as the TOZ; these
were popular both with peasants and with local party activists who were involved
with the problem, and thousands of poorer peasants rushed to join them during
the first half of 1928. However, the government ignored them and they were
banned early in 1930 once the decision for forced collectivization had been
taken.18 James R. Millar argues that the problem could have been solved by a
sensible, more flexible pricing policy which gave peasants reasonable incentives.
He came to the conclusion that ‘mass collectivization of Soviet agriculture must
be reckoned as an unmitigated economic policy disaster.’19 There is also the
strongly held view that even if total collectivization was the only answer, it could
have been achieved gradually and without the use of force.
»»
\
(c) The drive for collectivization
‘The events of 1929-34 constitute one of the great dramas of history... affecting
virtually every aspect of Soviet life;’ so wrote Alec Nove about this period of
Stalin’s ‘revolution from above.’20 Basically what happened in agriculture was
that about 25 million small peasant farms were consolidated into some 200,000
large collective farms (kolkhozy), and hundreds of thousands of other peasants
were taken on as paid labourers on state farms (sovkhozy). The theory was that
these larger farms would be much more efficient, enabling the use of modern
farming methods and machinery, especially tractors. Kulaks were not allowed to
join the collectives; their land and stock were taken away from them and they
were expelled from the area. There was untold suffering and later on a famine;
the death toll ran into many millions. By 1936 about 90 per cent of all peasant
households in the USSR had been collectivized.
Stalin himself explained the policy in an article in Pravda in November 1929: ‘if
the development of kolkhozy and sovkhozy proceeds at an accelerated pace,
there are no grounds for doubting that in three years or so, our country will
become a great grain country, if not the greatest in the world.’ As for the kulaks,
their fate had been decided: ‘We have gone over from a policy of limiting the
exploiting tendencies of the kulak as a class... Now we are able to carry on
a determined offensive against the kulaks, eliminate them as a class. Dekulak
ization is being carried out by the masses of poor and middle peasants
themselves... it is now an integral part of the formation and development of
collective farms. Consequently it is ridiculous and foolish to discourse at length
on dekulakization. When the head is cut off, you do not mourn for the hair. There
is another question no less ridiculous: whether kulaks should be permitted to
join collective farms. Of course not, for they are sworn enemies of the collective
farm movement.’21 It is difficult to be certain whether or not the Communist
leaders actually believed their own propaganda against the ‘malicious kulaks’,
but it certainly fits in with Marxist ideas of an ‘exploiting class' manipulating the
state for their own benefit. Beginning early in 1930, a huge batch of villages was
declared ready to be collectivized each month, and it was hoped that the main
grain-producing areas like the Volga and the Northern Caucasus would all be com
pleted by the spring of 1931. The actual process of collectivization was carried out
by the Red Army and secret police troops together with cadres of industrial workers
and party members from the cities who descended upon the villages to help ‘social
ize’ the countryside. The first 25,000 of these workers were only given two weeks’
training before being sent out as shock brigades. Local officials were very anxious
to push through collectivization in their area as quickly as possible; if it took too
long, they risked being branded as ‘Right-deviationists' - Bukharin sympathizers.
In theory force was only allowed against the kulaks; but the question was: who
exactly were the kulaks? In fact, historians now believe that there was no such
thing as a separate kulak class; they were simply the more successful and richer
peasants who were an integral part of every village. They were the leading farmers
in their village, often pioneers of new techniques and machinery, and respected
by most of their neighbours. Nevertheless the government insisted on dividing them
into three categories: ‘dangerous’ peasants known to be counter-revolutionaries —

flEPEOEflKM CEnbCHOrO
Xa3HHCTBa
Figure 6.1 A poster o f the early 1930s advocating collectivization. The banner reads: W e
are completing unbroken collectivization’. The caption below reads: W e are completing
victory in m aking socialist changes in agriculture’.
they were to be sent to labour camps or shot; the most wealthy peasants,
described as ‘arch-exploiters' - they were to be exiled to distant provinces; and
the least dangerous or loyal kulaks - they could stay in their native area but were
\
2 10 Mastering Twentieth-Century Russian History
only allowed a small piece of the worst land. The ‘twenty-five thousanders’, as the
workers' cadres became known, had been told that the kulaks were responsible
for the bread shortages in the cities, and they were determined on revenge at the
slightest provocation. When they arrived in the villages they had problems deciding
which were the kulaks and which category they fitted into. It was obvious that
many of the peasants who were being less than co-operative were hardly rich, and
so a new category of ‘sub-kulaks’ was introduced; these were middle or poor peas
ants who opposed collectivization, and therefore were to be treated as though
they were kulaks. So in fact lots of middle and poor peasants became involved in
the violence as well as the rich peasants. As well as being driven from their homes,
they had their livestock and other property confiscated. It was like War Communism
all over again, except much worse. Meanwhile the local officials spoke at village
meetings, trying to persuade the other peasants to sign up for the kolkhoz. If they
did so, their animals were declared the property of the kolkhoz; on the other hand
if they refused they were likely to be labelled as kulaks. On 20 February it was
announced that 50 per cent of all peasant households had been collectivized,
though it seems highly unlikely that this could have been achieved properly in
under two months in the middle of the Russian winter. Some writers have
suggested that this figure was based on exaggerated reports from nervous officials
who were anxious to impress their superiors.
The situation during the first few months of 1930 was chaotic and frenzied.
There was tremendous anger among the vast majority of peasants at the crude
and brutal behaviour of the collectivizers, and especially at the loss of their
livestock. There were violent scenes: officials were beaten and stoned, and many
peasants slaughtered their animals rather than hand them over to the collective.
Thousands of dispossessed kulaks and peasants left the countryside and went to
the towns in search of jobs. Outraged groups shouted slogans like ‘down with
the kolkhoz' and ‘Long live Lenin and the Soviets'. The secret police responded
by arresting thousands of ‘trouble-makers’ who were mainly exiled to Siberia
and the far north. Even Stalin seemed shaken by the resistance and decided to
call a temporary halt to the crash collectivization programme. On 2 March 1930
an article by Stalin headed ‘Dizzy with Success’ appeared in Pravda. hi it he
blamed local officials and the party cadres for the chaos, accusing them of
becoming over-enthusiastic and ‘drunk with success'. He pointed out that
collectivization was a matter of voluntary choice by peasants, and that force was
inappropriate; and he condemned the confiscation of cows and poultry. This
left local officials confused and embarrassed and some felt angry and betrayed
by central government whose orders they were carrying out. The famous edition
of Pravda in which Stalin's article appeared became a best-seller in the country
side as beleaguered officials tried desperately to limit its circulation. Delighted
peasants rushed to leave the kolkhozy: by the end of May around half of all
collectivized households had walked out. Collectivized peasant households had
reached a peak at 55 per cent of total households at the end of February 1930, or
so it was claimed; but by the end of May this figure had fallen to only 23.6 per
cent. These were averages over the whole country; some of the statistics for
individual areas were startling enough to suggest that collectivization must have
been all but abandoned: in the central Black-Earth Region the percentage of
collectivized households fell from almost 82 to 15.7, while in Moscow province
the fall was from 73 per cent to only 7.2 per cent.22But this was only a breathing-
space so that the spring sowing could be completed. Once this had been
achieved, Stalin had every intention of resuming the assault on the countryside
later in the year.
(d) The assault renewed

Amazingly in view of all the disruption and violence, the 1930 harvest was
a good one - the best since 1926. There was sufficient grain to feed the cities
and even some left over to export, earning vital income with which to help
finance industrialization. Unfortunately, grain exports earned less than had
been hoped because of a fall in world grain prices. Most recent historians
believe that the good weathèr was responsible for the successful harvest rather
than any special contribution from the kolkhozy. Often these were being farmed
by the poorest and least expert peasants, since the most efficient farmers - the
kulaks - had not been allowed to join. The government had promised large
numbers of tractors but only a small proportion had actually been delivered,
and even they were often not properly used because there was a shortage of
experienced drivers and mechanics. Nevertheless, one set of statistics sug
gested that although only 25 per cent of all peasants had joined collectives,
those kolkhozy actually produced 40 per cent of all grain delivered to the state.
This was only to be expected, given that the state controlled the marketing of
the kolkhozy produce, but it was enough to convince many leading commun
ists and officials that collectivization was the answer to the country's problems
and must be persevered with. However, the authorities played down the fact
that animal products were in shorter supply than usual because so many peas
ants had slaughtered their livestock.
In 1931 the campaign began again; this time it was more carefully planned, it
was carried out more slowly and there was perhaps less brutality. As an incentive
peasants were allowed to keep some cows and chickens; they were each given
a small plot of land and could spend part of the week working on it. Again the
technique was the same: communist party members and cadres of industrial
workers arrived in the villages to organize the kolkhozy, and some stayed on to
act as chairmen. The upheaval was enormous, and accurate statistics are impos
sible to obtain; but it is clear that during the first three years of the collectivization
drive, starting from the autumn of 1928, several million people - so-called kulaks
and their families - were uprooted from their homes and deprived of everything
they possessed. Some were resettled locally on the poorest land and some fled to
the towns. But the vast majority were less fortunate: by the end of 1930, accord
ing to official police statistics, 63,000 heads of households had been executed or
imprisoned; between 1929 and 1932 some 450,000 kulaks were deported to the
Urals, 375,000 to Siberia, almost 200,000 to Kazakhstan and over 130,000 to the
far north. Dmitri Volkogonov calculated that between eight and nine million
men, women, old people and children were affected by dekulakization, most of
them simply uprooted from the villages where their families had lived for genera
tions. Many were shot for resisting, and many died en route. In some places
»'
the process also swept up many middle peasants. Volkogonov came to the con
clusion that, one way or another, perhaps as many as eight per cent of peasant
households were 'sucked into the vortex'.23 By 1936 it was reported that 90 per
cent of peasant households had been collectivized.
There has been some controversy over whose was the responsibility for this
appalling policy with all its attendant chaos and misery. The traditional ‘totali
tarian’ view is that it was a ‘revolution from above' and that Stalin must bear the
responsibility, the famous Short Course of the history of the Communist Party,
which Stalin himself edited in 1938, stated quite clearly that ‘the distinguishing
feature of this revolution is that it was accomplished from above, on the initia
tive of the state,' and it went on to explain that it was ‘directly supported from
below by the millions of peasants, who were fighting to throw off kulak bondage
and to live in freedom in the collective farms.'24 While the first part of the
statement may well be true, there is very litde evidence that the revolution had
support from the great mass of the peasants, who only joined the collectives
because the alternatives were so unattractive. Revisionist and social historians
have argued that a revolution of this magnitude could not have been achieved
simply by the use of force from above. They showed that there were large groups
of people in Soviet society, especially young people from worker or peasant
backgrounds who had moved up in society, who actively supported the Stalinist
system, because they were doing well out of it. Members of the party bureau
cracy, managers, experts, trade union leaders, kolkhoz chairmen - these were
the people who benefited most from the regime and who did their best to stab
ilize it and prolong it. But there were other groups of people who supported the
regime, not simply because they benefited from it, but because they genuinely
believed in the ideals of the communists and the new Soviet society which they
were trying to build. For them collectivization was not just about squeezing more
grain out of the peasants; it was about control of the countryside - the extension
of Soviet 'culture' and Soviet ‘structures’ over the whole of the USSR. The old-
Leftist Trotskyite, Yurii Pyatakov, who became a strong supporter of the First
Five-Year Plan and collectivization, may well have been wrong, but he was not
alone when he declared that it was impossible to solve the problems of agriculture
within the existing framework of individual farming. ‘Therefore,’ he explained,
‘we are obliged to adopt extreme rates of collectivization of agriculture. In our
work we must adopt the rates of the Civil War. Of course I am not saying we
must adopt the methods of the Civil War, but that each of us is obliged to work with
the same tension with which we worked in the time of the armed struggle with
our class enemy. The heroic period of our socialist construction has arrived.’25
During the late 1980s and 1990s a so-called ‘new cohort’ of young American,
European and Russian historians emerged, including J. Arch Getty, Lynne Viola,
Stephen Kotkin and Jochen Hellbeck. They do not all agree on everything, but
there is some consensus over this concept of a revolution from below, motivated
by genuine ideological conviction and not just self-interest. There is evidence of
initiatives being taken from below: Lynne Viola argues that the party’s ‘revolu
tionary-heroic’ tradition was epitomized in the activities of people like the ‘twenty-
five thousanders’, and that in its early stages collectivization was developing a
momentum of its own and slipping out of central control.26 Many young people
Stalin In control 213

were genuinely inspired by Bolshevik ideas of what people should be like and
how a sociéty should be organized; they wanted to identify with the new socialist
society and ‘culture’ and become New Soviet people. Jochen Hellbeck, in his
analysis of the diary of Stepan Ppdlubnyi, a young man living in Moscow in the
early 1930s, charts one person's struggle to become a New Man. Podlubnyi was
the son of a well-to-do peasant in the Ukraine who was designated a kulak.
Stepan was only 15 when his father was dekulakized and deported to the far
north in 1929; somehow the boy and his mother obtained false papers showing
that they were from a working-class background and they escaped to Moscow.
There Stepan worked as an apprentice in the Pravda printing plant and joined
the Komsomol, the communist youth organization. He seemed to bear no ill-will
towards the regime for the way his family had been treated; he concentrated on
throwing off the stigma attached to him as the son of a kulak, trying to ‘recon
struct’himself and devote himself to the state. As Hellbeck puts it: ‘Only the state
could imbue him with the notion of being a free agent. It was through the Soviet
state that Podlubnyi acquired a sense of purpose, indeed the norms to define and
guide his personal life. As his case makes clear, Soviet man could realize himself
only by working for the state.'27 It was only later, around 1935, that Podlubnyi
became critical of Stalin’s brutal methods and the regime’s failure to live up to its
promises; even then, however, he did not criticize the overall Bolshevik vision of
the ideal society.
(e) The results of collectivization

Naturally Stalin claimed that collectivization was a great success; the press
simply repeated the official line, and no criticism was allowed. Incidents which
did not reflect well on the regime were not reported. The main achievement was
that state grain procurements increased impressively, more than doubling
between 1928 and 1933. Grain exports increased dramatically, especially in 1930
and 1931, and although they fell away after that, the 1933 export figure was still
ten times greater than the 1929 total:28
State grain procurements (in m illions of tons)
1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933

10.8 16.1 22.1 22.8 18.5 22.6
Grain exports (in millions of tons)
1927-8 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933

0.029 0.18 4.76 5.06 1.73 1.69
However, what Stalin did not reveal was that, apart from the exceptionally good
year of 1930, total grain production did riot increase at all - in fact it was less in
1934 than it had been in 1928: »
t V

Grain harvest (in millions of tons)
1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935

73.3 71.7 83.5 69.5 69.6 68.4 67.6 75.0
There were a number of reasons for this failure: the most obvious was that the
best producers - the kulaks - were excluded from the collective farms, and most
of the party activists who came from the cities to organize collectivization did not
know a great deal about agriculture. Many peasants seemed demoralized after
the initial seizure of their land and property, and according to Moshe Lewin, for
every three peasants who joined a kolkhoz, at least one soon left to try and find a
job in the city. Many peasants had slaughtered their horses rather than hand
them over to the kolkhoz; since the government had not yet provided sufficient
tractors, there were serious problems involved in trying to get the ploughing
completed in time.
And then there was the problem of wages. Collective farmers or kolkhozniki, as
they were called, were not paid wages; at the end of the agricultural year the
profits of the farm were divided out in proportion to the number of workdays put
in by each farmer. But for many years the cash payments on most kolkhozy were
tiny; as Robert Service puts it, ‘in reality most kolkhozniki could no more make
a profit in the early 1930s than fly to Mars.’29 The state fixed the quotas that each
kolkhoz (typically consisting of between 50 and 100 households managed by the
farm chairman) had to supply, at very low prices. Once the quota was met, any
surplus could be sold at the local market. Peasants were also allowed to sell pro
duce from their own private plots; this was one of the concessions made by the
government to try and improve relations with the surviving peasants. They soon
found that they could sell their vegetables, meat, eggs, butter and fruit at good
prices and they could make much more profit from their home produce than
from the collective farm. This meant that they worked much harder on their own
plots and did the bare minimum that they could get away with for the collective.
Since there were fewer peasants working than before, thanks to all the deport
ations and migrations, productivity fell; in fact in some areas it took three times
as long to get the harvest in as it did before collectivization. From Stalin’s point of
view, the success of the new system was that it made it easier for the state to get
its hands on the available grain without having to be constantly haggling with the
peasants. For the first time the state had taken significant steps towards control
ling the countryside. No longer would the kulaks hold the socialist state to ransom
by causing food shortages in the cities; it was the countryside that would suffer
now if there was a bad harvest.
It wasn't long before the countryside was ravaged by famine - in the winter of
1932-33. As the statistics show, the grain harvests of 1931,1932 and 1933 were all
disappointing in comparison with 1930. Yet in 1931 the state took more grain and
exported more grain than in 1930. During those years of 1930 and 1931 the state
exported almost ten million tons of grain, which ran down the reserves. So
already in 1931 there were food shortages in some rural areas. In 1932 the gov
ernment increased the quotas, especially in the Ukraine, which was the greatest
Stalin in control 2 15
grain-producing area. Stalin seems to have been convinced that the Ukrainians,
motivatedby nationalism, were holding back too much of their grain, although
in 1931 they had handed over 42 per cent of their harvest. Stalin demanded over
50 per cent in 1932, but the Ukrainian Communist Party officials protested that this
was impossible. Some reductions were agreed, but even so, the grain-collecting
brigades had great difficulty in squeezing out the required quotas, and were
forced to take everything they could find. As many as half the local party officials
were arrested for being too lenient with the peasants, and anybody found with
more grain than they should have had was arrested under a law passed in April
1932, which made ‘pilfering foodstuffs' a crime punishable by death. Some
55,000 people were convicted and most received sentences of forced labour. The
result of all this was that by the autumn of 1932 there was a disastrous food short
age throughout the Southern Ukraine. Other grain-producing areas had similar
experiences, especially the Northern Caucasus, the Volga region and Kazakhstan.
The situation was worsened by the slaughter of so many animals - throughout
the USSR as a whole, almost half the cattle, two-thirds of the sheep and goats,
and well over half the pigs and horses had been killed between 1928 and 1933. In
Kazakhstan almost the entire sheep and goat population was wiped out. After
collectivization animals were on average much smaller and weaker than they had
been in the 1920s. Admittedly peasants were able to save on fodder, but it
severely limited their options on alternative foods. The decline in numbers of
animals showed itself in other ways - shortage of horses for ploughing and other
farm work, reduction in the supply of hides for leather and footwear, and of wool
for textiles.30
Nobody knows how many people died of starvation during the famine;
estimates range from about five million to around eight million. Hundreds of
thousands of people tried to move from the countryside into the nearest city or
into a more prosperous area, hoping to find food. But this proved difficult: in
December 1932 the government introduced an internal passport system to
prevent starving people from seeking refuge in the towns. Country people were
not given passports, and very few succeeded in getting through. Stalin was
apparently anxious to keep the unfortunate peasants bottled up in the country
side, so that as few people as possible knew about the enormity of the famine.
Roy Medvedev, the dissident Soviet historian, describes how ‘military barricades
and checkpoints were set up on highways and at railway stations to halt and turn
back peasants from the famine-stricken regions. Even those who reached the cit
ies did not receive help. The peasants did not have ration cards, and stores would
not sell them bread. In Kiev and in many other cities in the south the gathering of
the corpses of dead peasants began early in the morning; they were loaded onto
wagons and brought outside the city to be buried in large anonymous graves.'31
How did the young party activists, the members of the grain brigades, recon
cile their own roles with the terrible things they saw happening? Lev Kopelev,
a bright young enthusiast who later became disillusioned with Stalinism, wrote:
T was convinced that I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation
of the countryside; that the sufferings of the people who lived there were a result
of their own ignorance or the machinations of the class enemy; that those who
sent me knew better than the peasants how they should live, what they should
I v
sow and when they should plough/32 Stepan Podlubnyi confided similar
thoughts to his diary, after his mother had written to tell him about the situation
in their home village in the Ukraine: ‘an incredible famine is going on over there.
Half of the people have died of hunger. Now they are eating cooked beet tops.
There are plenty of cases of cannibalism... All in all it's a terrifying thing. I don’t
know why, but I don't have any pity for this. It has to be this way, because then it
will be easier to remake the peasants' smallholder psychology into the pro
letarian psychology that we need. And those who die of hunger, let them die. If
they can't defend themselves against death from starvation, it means they are
weak-willed, and what can they give to society?'33
The famine was not reported in the Russian press and Stalin consistently
denied that there was a famine. When one of the Ukrainian party leaders tried to
tell him about the dire situation in the Kharkhov area and appealed for grain to
be sent, Stalin told him: ‘You have made up quite a fable about famine, thinking
to frighten us, but it won’t work! You should join the Writers’ Union; then you
can write your fables and fools will read them.’ Many people were arrested for
uttering the words ‘famine in the south’ and it was not until 1956 that it was
possible to write about it. In fact, of course, the famine was man-made - it need
never have happened. Most historians agree that it was a deliberate policy
carried out by Stalin with a political aim: the total subjugation of the countryside.
Otherwise why were no relief measures taken? During the 1921 famine the
government, as well as organizing its own relief campaign, had also appealed for
help from abroad, and assistance came flooding in from all over the world. This
time there was no appeal for help and the outside world hardly knew that there
was a problem; and yet there was a great glut of agricultural produce which could
have been rushed in to ease the crisis. There is still no consensus as to exactly
what Stalin’s motives were; many Ukrainian historians, together with Robert
Conquest,34 believe that his aim was to destroy Ukrainian nationalism. Certainly
at the same time Moscow started a campaign against what it called Ukrainian
‘national Communists’, and over two thousand of them were arrested. On the
other hand it seems more likely that Stalin was aiming at all peasants in grain-
surplus areas generally, not just in the Ukraine. So many other areas were
affected by the famine and even in the Ukraine itself other nationalities -
Germans and Russians - suffered in the same way as the Ukrainians.
In many ways collectivization changed rural life less than might have been
expected. The press circulated reports giving the impression that Soviet agricul
ture now consisted entirely of huge mechanized collective farms, but this was
greatly exaggerated, certainly during the 1930s.The mir - the village commune -
was abolished in 1930, but the kolkhoz which took its place consisted, in most
cases, of the same village lands farmed by the same people, living in the same
huts, except that they worked together as a team. The main difference was that
a chairman appointed from outside acted as the manager and organized the
marketing of the crop. Most of the traditional village leaders, the elders, had been
classified as kulaks and removed. There were some giant kolkhozy and sovkhozy,
but they were not especially successful, and some of the kolkhozy were broken
up again into smaller units. From the peasants’ point of view the main change
was that they were worse off under collectivization: they had lost their land, their

animals and much of their freedom; for a time their movements were restricted
by the passport system, and they were expected to do forced labour repairing
roads and cutting timber, as they did in the old days of serfdom. There is evi
dence of a gradual decline in the peasants' standard of living. The most productive
farmers had been excluded, there was barely any improvement in productivity,
per capita food consumption decreased and the birthrate fell. The peasants felt
embittered and demoralized and they looked back on the period of NEP as a
golden age. And ironically there is no evidence that grain exports made a worth
while financial contribution to the development of industry. The millions of tons
of grain that were exported in 1931 and 1932, and which could have more or less
alleviated the famine in Russia, only contributed to the glut of grain on the world
market; the prices were at rock bottom and the profits made available for invest
ment in industry were negligible. In fact some economists calculate that the state
was forced to use valuable resources to help agriculture recover, and that this
cancelled out whatever profits had been made from grain exports. It was only in
1953 that the livestock figures recovered to their 1928 levels again.
Probably the biggest change was the departure of millions of people heading
for the towns and cities. Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown that between 1928 and
1932 the urban population increased by some twelve million people, and at least
ten million peasants left the countryside and became wage-earners in industry.
A large proportion of them were young, able-bodied peasants; this, together with
'dekulakization' and the disappearance of the most efficient peasants, goes a
long way towards explaining the future weakness of collectivized agriculture and
the demoralization of the remaining peasants.35 On the other hand this migration
provided the necessary labour force for the rapid development of Soviet industry.
6.4 Industry and the Five-Year Plans \

(a) The First Five-Year Plan takes shape
Discussions about the further development of industry began about August
1925, during meetings of the State Economic Planning Commission (Gosplan),
and other discussions took place among economists. By this time it was becoming
clear that NEP, although modestly successful, had serious limitations (see section
6.2(b)). Further significant increases in production could only be achieved through
massive capital investment in new plant, and this needed careful centralized
planning. All the leaders agreed that industrialization was a priority, but they
could not agree on the rate of industrialization. As we saw earlier (see section
6.1(c)), in late 1925 and early 1926 the argument raged between those on the left
of the party (Kamenev and Zinoviev) who wanted to industrialize as rapidly as
possible and to raise the necessary funds by squeezing the peasants, and those
on the right (Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky) who favoured a more measured
approach based on co-operation with the peasants. At first Stalin supported
the moderates, but once the left was defeated, he came out in favour of rapid
industrialization. In 1928 Gosplan brought out a plan which contained both
'basic' and 'optimum' estimates of industrial production and investment over
I V

the next five years; whichever variant was adopted, it was due to go into
operation in October 1928. Having already defeated the left, Stalin now turned
against the right and placed the party firmly behind the optimum plan, the very
policy which he had opposed earlier. The main emphasis was to be on heavy
industry, iron and steel, and on producer goods - machines which would be used
to produce other tools; the coal and oil industries were also to be involved. Over
the next five years it was intended that coal and oil production should roughly
double, while iron ore and pig iron should treble. Many economists thought
these targets were far too ambitious, but after the Shakhty trials earlier in 1928
(see section 6.2(b)), they were afraid to speak out. According to Isaac Deutscher,
Stalin ‘seemed to live in a half-real and half-dreamy world of statistical figures
and indices, of industrial orders and instructions, a world in which no target and
no objective seemed to be beyond his and the party's grasp. He coined the
phrase that there were no fortresses which could not be conquered by the
Bolsheviks.'36 During the course of the plan the estimates were revised upwards:
coal output was to treble, oil output to increase four times, and iron ore and pig
iron to increase five times. In fact the plan was changed so often that some
historians claimed it never actually existed in the first place.
Stalin told the Russian people that this breakneck pace of industrialization was
vital for the survival of their socialist fatherland which, he felt sure, would inevit
ably come under attack from the capitalist nations. He wanted the country to be
self-sufficient and prepared. Russia must be converted from a country ‘that
imports machines and equipment into a country that produces machines and
equipment.' The Party Conference of April 1929 adopted as its main aim ‘the
maximum development of the production of the means of production as the
foundation of the industrialization of the country.' Early in 1931, in one of his
most famous speeches, Stalin told a group of business executives: ‘It is some
times asked whether it is possible to slow down the tempo somewhat, to put
a check on the movement. No, comrades, it is not possible; the pace must not be
slackened! On the contrary, we must quicken it as much as is within our powers
and possibilities... To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind; and those who
lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten. The history of old Russia was
[to be] ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness... for military backwardness, for
cultural backwardness, for political backwardness, for industrial backwardness,
for agricultural backwardness... We are fifty or a hundred years behind the
advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or
they crush us.’37There were political motives too - Stalin continued to see indus
trial workers as the main allies of the communists; greater industrialization would
increase the proportion of workers to peasants, the ‘class enemies’. Incidentally,
the policy of rapid industrialization also fell in conveniently with Stalin's campaign
to defeat Bukharin, who wanted to follow the basic variant of the plan.
(b) The First Five-Year Plan goes into operation

The plan began officially in October 1928, and was declared to have been completed
in December 1932 - nine months early. New work had already started before the
plan was officially inaugurated. In the year 1926-27 investment in new projects
Stalin in control 2 19
more than doubled, and the great Dnieper Dam was begun. A new tractor factory
was completed at Stalingrad in June 1930, and all over the country work went
ahead on massive projects, some 1500 of them: a new railway line (the Turksib
Railway) linking Turkestan and Siberia; a tractor factory at Kharkhov; many new
iron and steel works; a huge plant at Nizhny Novgorod (Gorky) for the manufac
ture of turbines, cars and lorries; mining projects in Kazakhstan; and engineering
works in Georgia. There were several major canals and a series of thirteen dams
along the Volga providing water for electricity and irrigation. One of the great
showpieces was Magnitogorsk, a brand new industrial (mainly steel) city built in
what was previously virgin wilderness in the south-eastern Urals, safe from
invading forces. All these were new projects which did not reach full production
until well on in the Second Five-Year Plan (1933-37).
It was a remarkable campaign by any standards; there were incredibly difficult
problems to overcome; conditions in some areas were primitive and there were
many disasters on the way. In spite of the announcement that the plan had been
completed nine months early, the targets had not been reached. However,
experts agree that a huge leap forward had been made with an annual industrial
growth rate of between 15 per cent and 22 per cent during the four years of the
plan. In the early days there was tremendous enthusiasm among many of the
young party members and Komsomol members who were prepared to throw all
their energies into ‘the great construction projects of socialism'. According to
Alec Nove, ‘many seemed to have been fired by a real faith in the future and in
their own and their children's part in it... with a will to self-sacrifice, accepting
hardship with a real sense of comradeship.'38 Some volunteered for the ‘shock
brigades', gangs of committed workers who descended on the factories to show
ordinary workers how it should all be done, by setting new production records
and sharing out their earnings equally. Hiroaki Kuromiya argues that in spite of
all the hardships endured by the workers, the enthusiasm for the First Five-Year
Plan was shared by the vast majority of the working class, who were ip fact the
main supporters of Stalin’s regime in the early 1930s.39 However, Donald Filtzer
believes that Kuromiya exaggerates the proportion of workers who were genu
inely enthusiastic and politically motivated; he argues that the shock-workers
were never more than a small minority and were not typical of the overwhelming
mass of ordinary workers on the shop-floor.40
There was intense government propaganda linking the industrialization drive
to national defence and the danger of foreign invasion. The constant upward
revision of targets was designed to keep workers on their toes and galvanize them
into superhuman efforts. Other attempts to encourage greater efforts included
a return to some capitalist practices - wage differentials, piece-work, bonuses,
and offers of better food and lodging for those who improved their productivity.
Great attention was paid to the ideas and methods of F.W. Taylor, the American
time and motion expert (see section 5.2(b)) much admired by Lenin. Where
expertise was lacking, the government brought in foreign experts, including
British, Germans and Americans; American planners and engineers were heavily
involved in the construction of Magnitogorsk.
At the halfway stage of the plan Stalin claimed to be dissatisfied with progress
and launched an attack on ‘experts', accusing them of ‘wrecking* and ‘sabotage*.
t \
The new slogan was ‘Destroy the Wreckers'; Stalin told the 1930 Party Congress:
‘people who chatter about the necessity of reducing the rate of development of
industry are enemies of socialism, agents of our class enemies.’ Hundreds of
economists, planners and engineers were arrested; in the Donbass half the engin
eers and technicians had been arrested by the end of 1931, and these included
many foreign experts accused of sabotage. One group of economists and engin
eers was put on trial on the unlikely charge of aiding the French to attack the
USSR. At the end of 1930 a group of 48 officials from the People's Commissariat
of Trade was shot for sabotage in the food trade. Hundreds of older experts
trained before the revolution were removed and replaced by younger graduates
trained under the Soviet system. Stalin put two of his most reliable friends in top
positions: Kuibyshev became head of Gosplan and Ordzhonikidze took over
VSNKh (Supreme Council of National Economy); when that was abolished in
1932 Ordzhonikidze became People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry. By this time
the terror campaign against the ‘bourgeois experts' had had the desired effect -
all open criticism and opposition was stifled. Ordzhonikidze now felt able to relax
the hard-line towards experts and skilled workers, and tried instead to promote
co-operation and good industrial relations.
How did the government raise the cash to finance these enormous projects?
Given the disappointing profits from grain exports, they had to look elsewhere
for revenue. Much came from the sale of government bonds which people were
more or less forced to buy. Duties on vodka, salt and matches were increased and
a tax was place on the sale of goods. Agriculture did contribute something, but
not in the expected way; the grain procurement agencies paid very low prices to
the peasants and then sold the grain to the state flour mills at sometimes four
times the price paid; the government taxed the difference, which boosted gov
ernment revenue by some 30 per cent. One of the simplest devices was to print
more banknotes, so that the amount of money in circulation increased five-fold
between 1928 and 1933. The government increased its control over the economy
in general so that it was transformed into what was known as a ‘command econ
omy'. This enabled ruthless decisions to be taken about which were the priority
projects so that scarce cash and other resources could be channelled to where
they were most urgently needed. For example it was decided that the targets for
consumer goods such as textiles, which were considered to be less important,
should be revised downwards, while those for metals were revised upwards.
(c) Successes and failings of the First Five-Year Plan

Whatever the criticisms and failings of the plan and Stalin's methods - and there
are many - the evidence suggests that there was a remarkable increase in indus
trial output. Official Soviet statistics show that targets for gross industrial pro
duction, producers' goods and machinery were not only fulfilled but ‘over-filled’.
However, the official statistics are extremely suspect, and even they show that
there were shortfalls in several important areas. Even so, most economists and
historians agree that a great leap forward did take place. American economist
Holland Hunter estimated that Soviet industry expanded by at least 50 per cent
in the five years from 1928, and that between 1928 and 1940, industrial output

grew on average by 17 per cent per year.41Alec Nove came to the conclusion that
‘there is ho doubt at all that a mighty engineering industry was in the making,
and output of machine-tools, turbines, tractors, metallurgical equipment, etc.
rose by genuinely impressive percentages.’42 It was a time of laying the foun
dations on which the further expansion of industry could take place during the
second and third Five-Year Plans. All privately owned enterprises and workshops
ceased to exist and even small craftsmen and shopkeepers were either forced out
of business or made to join state-supervised co-operatives. The state took over
almost total control of the economy.
There was an improvement in transport: the Turksib Railway was opened in
January 1931, making raw cotton from Central Asia more readily available for the
textile industry, while food and fuel could be brought more easily to Central Asia
and Kazakhstan from western Russia. There was still a long way to go, however,
to bring the transport system up to the high standards of western Europe. On the
railways there was a constant shortage of spare parts and skilled engineers and
not enough time for proper maintenance. In 1932 the average speed of a Russian
goods train was just under nine miles per hour. As for the canals, many of them
froze during the winter and were therefore of only limited value.
Progress was made with armaments; during the course of the plan Stalin
diverted more and more investment into the defence sector of industry, in order
to build up Russia’s military strength. No statistics are available, for obvious
reasons, but the aircraft industry was a top priority, closely followed by the
production of tanks. The government claimed that the plan had enabled the USSR
to avoid the worst effects of the world economic crisis which developed after the
Wall Street Crash of October 1929. While the USA and western Europe suffered
all kinds of economic disaster - share prices and banks collapsed, firms went out
of business, and millions of people were thrown out of work - the people of the
USSR continued to enjoy stability and full employment. Soviet propaganda made
the most of the industrial successes and there was no mention of accidents, delays,
shortages, faulty planning, falling standards of living and strikes. Marx had been
right after all, they argued; the capitalist system was collapsing and the Soviet
system was the model for the rest of the world to follow. Western economists
began to sit up and take notice of Russian achievements, and in some quarters,
a grudging respect began to develop.
If they had known the true situation their assessments would no doubt have
been very different. There were two main weaknesses in the plan: a large proportion
of the products were of poor quality, and the workers were shamefully exploited,
many of them having to endure totally unacceptable living and working con
ditions. Poor-quality products were common because high targets and quotas
forced workers to speed up and caused shoddy workmanship, even among older
experienced workers. Much of the new labour force consisted of peasants who
had come into industry to escape from collectivization; they were completely
unskilled and had no experience of industrial discipline or time-keeping.
Although some learned very quickly, it took time to train them, and in the mean
time a lot of damage was done to machinery through sheer ignorance. Another
contributing problem was the high turnover of labour: newly arrived peasants,
bewildered and dismayed by, the appalling conditions, moved from job to job
*V
trying to find something better. In the coal industry, for example, the average
worker changed jobs three times during 1930. Many of the new factories had
been built in a slipshod way using poor materials. New equipment was often
made out of defective metal, so that it did not function efficiently. As Donald
Filtzer points out, although this was all shown in the statistics as growth, defect
ive products could not be used; they had to be scrapped or remade. This meant
that ‘fuel and raw materials were squandered, overconsumed, or simply lost;
over the economy as a whole the endemic inefficiencies of industry, transport
and construction caused them to soak up inordinately large amounts of inputs
relative to the output they produced.’43 The Stalingrad tractor factory provides
a good example: completed in June 1930, its target was 500 tractors a month;
however, in July none at all were completed, in August there were 10, and in
September 25. Unfortunately, after a few weeks' normal usage, the tractors began
to fall apart. John Scott, an American engineer who was full of socialist ideals,
went to work on the building of Magnitogorsk. He described how ‘during the
winters of 1933 and 1934 the whole blast furnace department was periodically
shut down. The cold winds played havoc with the big furnaces... tons of ice
hung down all around, sometimes collapsing steel structures with their weight
... One job we all remembered was the demolition work after the disastrous
explosion on No. 2; the blast blew the roof off the cast house, badly damaged the
side of the furnace and seriously injured everybody who was near at the time.
Several people were tried in an attempt to fix responsibility.’44
Industrial workers came under intense pressure to achieve their targets; the
nervous-breakdown rate increased alarmingly and many older workers who
failed to cope were simply forced out of their jobs. By 1929 there was consider
able labour unrest; workers began to speak out about the physical and mental
stress they were suffering as they tried to reach impossible targets; articles
appeared in the trade union newspaper complaining that their treatment was
worse than ‘capitalist exploitation’. Some workers refused to carry out orders and
others resorted to ‘go-slows', alcohol or persistent absenteeism. There were
strikes and demonstrations all over the country in protest against the raising of
targets, delays in paying wages and the deduction of compulsory loans to the
state. In 1932 there was a major strike in the textile city of Ivanovo-Voznesensk
when almost the entire workforce refused to go back to work after the May Day
holiday in protest against food shortages. The government felt that this could not
be allowed to continue; in March 1929 factory directors were given the power to
ignore the usual arbitration procedures and the trade unions and to sack people
on the spot; trade union powers to protect workers were reduced and they were
now required to devote themselves to increasing production and furthering the
plan; in effect they were little more than tools of the management. Things got
even more nasty in 1932 as the number of strikes increased: a single day's unjus
tified absence (which could be interpreted as being twenty minutes late for work)
could be punishable by instant dismissal, denial of food ration cards and access
to food shops, and by eviction from lodgings. Managers could be arrested if their
performance was thought to be below standard; if a machine broke down or was
used incorrectly, the manager was likely to be charged with ‘wrecking' or ‘sabo
tage'. Scapegoats had to be found for any failures or disasters, like the explosion

at Magnitogorsk; the regime would never admit that the cause might be any fault
of the plan. Strikes were broken up by force and the ring-leaders arrested; every
worker had an individual production record and could expect trouble if he came
at the bottom of the league table.
Donald Filtzer believes that a major aim of this harsh campaign, as well as
mass mobilization of the workforce in order to achieve the targets, was to break
down working-class solidarity and destroy its ability to act collectively. All the
evidence suggests that the regime was successful in its aim: ‘the old working class
ceased to exist as a class. A new workforce took its place, but the atomization it
encountered at work and in daily life made it impossible for it to function as
a militant class able collectively to articulate and pursue its own radical needs.’
A combination of circumstances contributed towards the regime's success in
causing this fragmentation of the labour force: the dwindling number of older
workers with traditions of trade union organization and militancy; the influx of
so many peasants with no experience of collective action; the presence of the
young enthusiasts - the Komsomol members - who were keen to join the shock
brigades; the rapid turnover of labour as ‘workers roamed the country looking for
any job that offered better wages, rations or housing.’ Even many older skilled
workers left their traditional industries in the search for something better. In
1930-32 the average industrial worker changed jobs once every eight or nine
months. All this against a background of difficult working conditions deprived
workers of any coherence; they were reduced to waging a struggle for personal
survival and had little time or energy left for political organization and militancy.
There was a way out for a minority of workers: to work their way up to positions
in management or in the party bureaucracy, which was achieved by perhaps
15 per cent of the labour force during the First Five-Year Plan. On the other hand
the workers were not entirely helpless; there were constant labour shortages and
many managers, anxious to achieve their targets, were reluctant to dismiss
people who broke the rules. As the 1930s progressed, a kind of unwritten mutual
collusion agreement emerged between workers and management, since it was in
both their interests to ignore the law.45
It wasn’t only at work that the labour force seemed to be under attack - living
conditions were often atrocious as well. The plan estimated an urban population
by 1932 of 32.5 million, but the actual figure turned out to be 38.7 million. The
targets for new housing were reduced to less than half so that more factories
could be built, and consequently there was serious overcrowding in industrial
areas. Again much of the new housing was of poor quality, maintenance was
poor, and there was a shortage of water, shops and other amenities. Apartments
and kitchens had to be shared and this put appalling strains on family life, creat
ing, in the words of Moshe Lewin, ‘the specifically Soviet (or Stalinist) reality of
chronically overcrowded lodgings, with consequent attrition of human relations,
strained family life, destruction of privacy and personal life, and various forms of
psychological strain. All this provided a propitious hunting ground for the ruthless,
the primitive, the blackmailer, the hooligan, and the informer. The courts dealt
with an incredible mass of cases testifying to the human destruction caused by
this congestion of dwellings.'46The birth rate fell dramatically, the child mortality
rate was increasing, and by 1936 the big industrial cities were experiencing a net
» V
224 Mastering Twentieth-Century f^tissian History

loss of population. City dwellers also suffered from recurrent food shortages; by
the end of 1929 all basic foodstuffs were rationed and gradually most consumer
goods were rationed too. The worst time was the winter of 1932-33 when the
countryside was experiencing the disastrous famine (see section 6.3(e)). There
was rapid inflation, partly caused by the government's policy of printing more
paper money; although actual money wages rose, real wages fell dramatically,
and there was a marked fall in the workers’ standard of living. Stalin would not
admit publicly that there was any problem; in January 1933 he claimed that
wages had risen by 67 per cent and completely ignored the rising prices. ‘We
have unquestionably reached a position,' he told his audience, ‘where the material
conditions of the workers and peasants are improving from year to year. The only
ones who can have doubts on this score are the sworn enemies of the Soviet
regime.'
(d) The Second and Third Five-Year Plans

The Second Five-Year Plan began immediately the first one was declared
completed at the end of December 1932. It ran from January 1933 until it too was
declared to have been completed early in 1937. It did not begin well: at the start
of the year the country was still in the grip of the famine, there was a transport
crisis and shortages of all kinds. Even Stalin realized that the targets set were
totally impossible, and the industrialization drive was allowed to slow down for
a time while the economists carried out a recalculation. The revised plan aimed
to consolidate the achievements of 1928-32 and to increase the output of consumer
goods to enable living standards to improve. However, during 1934 the plan was
changed again, with more investment being diverted towards heavy industrial
production. The probable reason for this was the need to increase armaments in
view of the rise to power of Hitler in Germany in January 1933. Consequently the
targets for consumer goods and housing were once again not achieved. On the
other hand there were some good features in 1934: food rationing was brought to
an end, statistics suggest that real wages doubled, and many of the new factories
and plants which had suffered teething-troubles earlier now came on full stream.
The years 1935 and 1936 were also successful. Highly impressive were the growth
rates in the machinery and metal-producing sectors, and in coal and electricity
production. Although targets were not attained, output of consumer goods
nevertheless increased and more was available for sale. Great progress was made
in developing a more educated working class; there were numerous training
schemes and opportunities for workers to receive higher level technological
education at universities.
One of the most interesting features of the second plan was the Stakhanovite
movement. Alexei Stakhanov was a miner in the Donbass in the Ukraine. In
September 1935, with a team of assistant workers to help him, Stakhanov set a
new record by cutting 102 tons of coal in a single shift, which was about fourteen
times greater than the norm. His achievement was widely publicized and Stakha
nov was elevated to the status of a national hero - a champion shock worker whom
everybody should emulate. The government urged workers in all branches of
the economy to follow his example by introducing new techniques and work

patterns. Soon every industry had produced its Stakhanovite —the champion
workers who had established new production records and whose pictures now
appeared all over the country. The campaign gathered momentum, pressurizing
both workers and managers to work harder and faster. It was all very misleading -
these champions were not achieving new records on their own but as leaders of
teams; nevertheless the government used it as an excuse to increase output
norms in a number of industries. ‘All saboteurs, routinizers, and bureaucrats will
be swept away by the glorious march of the Stakhanovites,’ warned Andrei
Zhdanov, the new Leningrad party boss. Needless to say, the Stakhanovites
became unpopular with ordinary rank-and-file workers who were likely to
respond to their new targets by going-slow. In some places Stakhanovites were
attacked and beaten up; in the long term the Stakhanovite movement may well
have done more harm than good. Donald Filtzer believes that ‘at its high point
Stakhanovism led to greater disruption than it alleviated, as the efforts of the
record-breaking minority created bottlenecks by disrupting the smooth flow
of production.’ As soon as the novelty had worn off by mid-1937, the old pattern
of work practices quickly came back in. Admittedly by 1940 techniques had
become more modem, but this was due more to new technology than to the
Stakhanovites.47
In 1937 there was a sudden slowdown caused by a sharp fall in investments as
more and more resources were diverted into armaments. Another contributing
factor was undoubtedly the purges (see next section) which removed from the
scene thousands of engineers, managers, technicians, planners and economists
who were said to be saboteurs or spies in the pay of enemies of the people. Many
were executed and the rest sent to labour camps in remote areas. Not only did
this cause a serious shortage of experts, it also stifled initiative among the
remainder, since any mistake or accident would be construed as ‘wrecking’.
Apart from Stalin's political motives - his desire to hold on to supreme power -
there was an economic motive behind some aspects of the purges. It enabled him
to claim that all the economic shortfalls, shortages, poor-quality goods and trans
port difficulties were the work of class enemies who were trying to discredit the
government. For example, Pravda reported that the shortage of eggs had been
caused by wreckers who deliberately smashed eggs in transit just to deprive the
Soviet people of the fruits of their labour and to turn them against the govern
ment.40 Five men were shot in Minsk for ‘wilful contamination of flour; another
five were shot in the village of Tabory in the Urals for ‘disrupting the kolkhoz'.
The Third Five-Year Plan (1938-42) was cut short by the USSR’s involvement in
the Second World War in June 1941. The plan aimed to double production in all
sectors of heavy industry and to increase consumer goods substantially. Another
important aim was secondary education for all children living in cities and
a minimum of seven years’ education for children living in the countryside. Once
again, in spite of official claims, targets were not achieved, although industrial
output did continue to rise. There was a shortage of labour, the effects of the
purges continued to be felt, and there was a shortage of iron ore and sometimes
coal As the pace began to flag, the regime decided that discipline, which had
been relaxed somewhat in the three godd years of 1934-36, must be tightened up
again. In 1939 an old tsarist practice was brought back - the labour book, with
I V

which every worker was issued. It was like a student’s report card, listing the
worker’s qualifications, jobs, special achievements and offences. Stalin genu
inely hoped that the gradual improvement in living standards during the second
plan would win over both workers and peasants to the regime; but by 1940, after
a decade of mobilization and assaults on their freedom, the vast majority of
workers and peasants must have been reduced to, at best, complete apathy, and
at worst, outright hostility.
Most historians and economists agree that during the 1930s the USSR, under
the leadership of Stalin, experienced a remarkable expansion and modernization
of industry. Even those most critical of Stalin himself allow this; Roy Medvedev
wrote: ‘I am not about to deny the major successes achieved by the Soviet Union
during the first five year plan. In the period from 1928 to 1933 alone, 1500 big
enterprises were built and the foundations laid for branches of industry that had
not existed in tsarist Russia: machine-tool production, automobile and tractor
manufacturing, chemical works, aircraft factories, the production of powerftd
turbines and generators, of high-grade steel and so o n ... The eastern part of the
country became a second major centre for metallurgy and the oil industry.
A modem defence industry was established. And hundreds of new cities and
workers’ settlements were founded. Stalin put considerable effort into the huge
task of building a modem industry in the Soviet Union.’49 The question which
has exercised historians greatly is this: did it need Stalin and his brutal methods
to force the USSR into this great leap forward, or could it have been achieved by
more conventional methods? It was Alec Nove who once put the question in an
article in Encounter, was Stalin really necessary? One line of argument is that
after the great spurt around the turn of the century, Russian industry had
stagnated and had fallen even further behind the West. Work practices and tech
niques remained so inefficient and chaotic that something really drastic was
needed to wake people up to the necessity of rapid expansion and modern
ization to make the USSR into a great industrial power. Thus Martin McCauley
suggests that ‘the First Five-Year Plan was a period of genuine enthusiasm, and
prodigious achievements were recorded in production. The impossible targets
galvanized people into action and more was achieved than would have been the
case had orthodox advice been followed.’50
Alec Nove leans towards a similar view; he believes that as far as industrial
planning is concerned, given the inheritance from the tsarist period, it is difficult
to conceive that there was any genuinely viable alternative to the course Stalin
took. ‘Under Stalin’s leadership an assault was launched against the fortress,
defended by class enemies, and on obstacles to rapid industrial growth. The
assault succeeded in part, failed in some sectors, but failures could be said to be
inherent in the process of learning. The later improvements in planning tech
nique were based on lessons learnt in the course of storming the heavens... A
great industry was built... and where would the Russian army have been in 1942
without a Urals-Siberian metallurgical base?’ On the other hand Nove also
points out that Stalin made vast errors: he tried to go too far much too fast,
ignored sound advice, resorted to unnecessarily brutal methods in both town
and country, and treated all criticism, even when it was justified, as evidence of
subversion and treason.51

Maanito- New industrial
ë gorsk cities
Z Trans-Siberian
Railway
□. Main industrial
A areas
'ÇTfXK White Sea Canal
3 • Area of forced
I labour camps.
The largest
h
% ■ areas contained
hundreds of
5 - camps.
6
!
Z3
I
I'
^3
Map 6.1 The expansion of Soviet industry and labour camps under Stalin.
It is these excesses which lead others to the conclusion that similar or even
better results could have been achieved without Stalin. As Medvedev puts it
‘There are many examples of Stalin's incompetence and adventurism, which
greatly complicated the already complex job of industrialization... It is possible
to say with certainty that industrialization during the first five year plan pro
ceeded at a slower pace and higher price not least of all because Stalin was the
head of the party and the government. If the extreme exertions and sacrifices
which the people made for the sake of industrialization are compared with the
results, the conclusion cannot be avoided: the results would have been far
greater without Stalin.'52James R. Harris has recently shown how constant pres
sure from Moscow hindered production in the Urals region by causing all kinds
of unnecessary tensions. The government's refusal to accept any excuses or
delays made it impossible to raise and discuss genuine problems with central
officials. Local managers were blamed for any serious accidents and other prob
lems and were put on trial And so the local ruling clique in the Urals region
muddled on until well over half way through the Second Five-Year Plan, using a
range of cover-up strategies - sending in exaggerated production figures and
underestimates of production capacity; worst of all, they often deliberately turned
out poor quality goods just to increase the production figures. Unfortunately for
them, it was impossible to conceal underfulfilment indefinitely, and in 1936 the
Central Committee demanded explanations; in the ensuing purge of ‘enemies of
the people', hundreds of conspirators were arrested and shot. Since these prac
tices were repeated all over the country, from the economic point of view the Sta
linist approach was disastrous - it forced people to make personal survival rather
than the modernization of industry their first priority.53
Donald Filtzer is even more damning: he argues that Stalin's methods caused
the emergence in the USSR of an industrial system which was neither capitalist
nor socialist, but which was, in fact, a ‘deformed productive apparatus.' Because
so many industrial units had been built in a hurry, using poor materials, they
continued to produce poor-quality goods. Although this might have been
expected in the early stages of industrialization because of normal teething
troubles, the problem in Russia was that the new system of production and of
industrial relations proved impossible to reform, and the Soviet state was left
with a set of economic problems which could not be overcome within the exist
ing framework of society. It was for this reason that ‘Stalinism proved historically
unstable and transient... from the late 1980s onwards its breakup was simply a
matter of tim e...The system could digest neither internal reform nor the
attempt at a full-scale restoration of capitalism, launched by Gorbachev from
mid-1990 onwards.'54Another important legacy of the Stalinist industrialization
was the ecological disaster; not only were safety and decent working conditions
neglected, but no consideration was given to the effect of these vast ‘smoke
stack' plants on the environment, which suffered massive pollution.
Some historians still hold to the view that similar results could have been
achieved by sticking to the sensible and realistic NEP framework. American
economist Holland Hunter has calculated that if the growth rates under NEP had
continued throughout the 1930s, the USSR would have reached the same industrial
and military capacity; there would have been a more even spread of expansion,

less waste, less expense both in financial and human terms, and less defective
output.5S*vOne thing seems certain: the Soviet people under Bukharin s leader
ship would have been less shell-shocked and happier with the government.
Arguably Bukharin, with his shrewd eye for foreign affairs, would not have made
Stalin’s mistake of underestimating the threat from Hitler and Nazism, and
certainly would not have executed almost the entire army high command in the
years 1937-38 (see section 6.5(c)). Nor, presumably, would Bukharin have
indulged in the great Purges of the later 1930s. As R.W. Davies puts it: ‘the arrest
of officials, managers and engineers in industry and other sectors of the economy
... was a major factor in the economic disruption. Economic crisis in the Soviet
Union of the 1930s cannot be understood outside its political context.’56
6.5 Politics and the Purges

(a) The Stalinist political system and the background
to the Purges
During the years 1928-40 Stalin and his closest allies gradually tightened their
grip on the party, the government and the local party organizations, until by 1938
all criticism and disagreement had been driven underground and Stalin’s
personal dictatorship was complete. By the summer of 1930 the government's
popularity had fallen sharply with the general public because of collectivization
and the rigours of the First Five-Year Plan. Some prominent communist leaders,
including Beso Lominadze, the party chief in Transcaucasia, appalled l>y the
brutalities of collectivization and the excessive cost of industrialization, called for
more moderate policies and suggested ‘a clean sweep of the party leadership.’ ‘If
there is to be a spring cleaning,’ he remarked unwisely to a friend, ‘every piece of
furniture has to be removed, including the biggest one.’ Lominadze spid several
others were sacked, though as yet, they suffered no further punishment. Even
Stalin at this stage was sticking to Lenin’s warning that although the death
penalty was acceptable for non-party opponents, Bolsheviks should never
exterminate each other. But it was clear that there was a substantial body of
communists, some in the Central Committee and some in the Politburo, who
were unhappy with Stalin and were prepared to resist his drive for dictatorship.
Martemian Ryutin, head of the party committee in Krasnaya Presnya (a district of
Moscow), and a member of the Central Committee, organized a small opposition
group in Moscow which circulated a document known as the ‘Ryutin Platform’.
This called for an easing of the pressure on the countryside, more democracy in
the party and the removal of Stalin from the leadership by force. Stalin, who had
informers everywhere, soon found out, and Ryutin and seventeen members of
his group were arrested. The charge was that they had attempted to set up a
‘a bourgeois kulak organization to re-establish capitalism’. Stalin wanted them
executed, but Sergei Kirov (the Leningrad party boss) and other moderates in the
Politburo defeated Stalin; the culprits survived for the time being - they were
simply expelled from the party, Ryutin was given a ten-year gaol sentence and
the rest were sent to remote areas (September 1932). Early in January 1933 a third
i V

group of plotters was uncovered; these were Old Bolsheviks who included the
highly respected A.P. Smirnov who had been Commissar for Agriculture and
a party member since 1896. He had not been associated with either the Left or
Right opposition, but now he and his supporters wanted the removal of Stalin,
the break-up of most of the collective farms and the return of full powers to the
trade unions. They were all expelled from the party, but once again Kirov,
Ordzhonikidze and Kuibyshev voted against the death penalty and Stalin was
thwarted in his bid to have them executed.
At the same time Stalin resorted to the technique of blaming the famine, the
chaos in the countryside, industrial problems and transport difficulties on sabo
teurs. ‘The nearer we get to achieving socialism,’ he warned, ‘the more evident
will be the counter-revolutionary character of every oppositional tendency.’ The
Politburo called for a purge of party members, many of whom, Stalin claimed,
had been involved in organizing ‘kulak sabotage’. An atmosphere of suspicion
and fear was created in which everybody was encouraged to inform on ‘enemies
of the people’. It is impossible to say whether Stalin himself genuinely believed
that he was in danger of being overthrown; but he must have known that his
government was deeply unpopular, especially in the countryside; he didn’t trust
the Old Bolsheviks and the former Left and Right oppositionists, who were still at
liberty; and his close allies, who owed their positions to Stalin, no doubt felt
insecure, and distrusted many of the party and government officials below them.
And so the purge of party members went ahead: over 800,000 were expelled
during 1933 and a further 340,000 in 1934. By the end of 1933 there were already
about two million people in prison, in forced labour camps and deportation
camps.
As the economic situation began to improve during 1934 there was something
of a relaxation of tensions. The more moderate members of the leadership,
especially Kirov and Ordzhonikidze, were probably responsible for the range of
concessions made in agriculture and industry sometimes described as the ‘Great
Retreat’. This was partly an attempt to improve relations between the govern
ment and ordinary people, and it seems to have had some success. Even Dmitri
Volkogonov admits that in the mid-1930s ’Stalin’s popularity was genuine
among the masses.’ They believed what they were told about Stalin, that he was
‘the great helmsman’, steering the nation through all the perils and threats of
counter-revolution from the ‘class enemies', and many of them accepted the fab
rication that the failures and hardships were caused by saboteurs. Unfortunately
‘they had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to delve deeper into what
was going on.’57 The Seventeenth Party Congress which met in February 1934
was presented as the Congress of the Victors: it was a celebration of the successes
of collectivization and industrialization, and the defeat of the enemies within
the party.
Behind the scenes, however, there were disagreements: Stalin and his allies
Molotov and Kaganovitch wanted to continue the hard line, while Kirov and
Ordzhonikidze spoke in favour of moderation. Kirov wanted better relations with
writers and other members of the intelligentsia. In a rare example of public
disagreement, Ordzhonikidze objected to Molotov’s proposal to increase the
industrial growth rate by five per cent and suggested three per cent instead;

when a vote was taken, Ordzhonikidze’s proposal was carried. According to Roy
Medvedev, there is evidence that during the congress some of the moderates
held discussions about transferring Stalin from his post of General Secretary to
some other job and replacing him with Kirov. They went as far as to ask Kirov
whether or not he would be willing to stand, but he was strongly against the idea.
So impopular had Stalin become among the rank-and-file party members that
when the voting was held for the new Party Central Committee, he only just
scraped enough votes to become a member. On the orders of Kaganovitch, who
was the organizer of the election, the normal practice of publishing the number
of votes cast for each candidate was not followed. But Stalin knew the statistics
and he knew about the talks aimed at demoting him. It seems likely that by the
end of the congress Stalin cannot have been feeling too secure. ‘Events had
shown a growing lack of confidence in Stalin among wide circles of party activ
ists. Stalin was always extremely sensitive to such signals. He felt that his position
and power were in danger, and this danger was personified for him by Sergei
Mironovich Kirov.'58
(b) The murder of Kirov and the beginning of the Purges

On the afternoon of 1 December 1934, a young Communist party member,
Leonid Nikolaev, walked into the Smolny, the party headquarters in Leningrad,
and hung around unchallenged in a corridor near Kirov's office. Shortly after
wards, as Kirov came along to his office, Nikolaev stepped out and shot him dead
from behind. The murder caused a sensation and Stalin and his entourage
rushed to Leningrad from Moscow to investigate. What happened over the"next
four years must have seemed like an endless nightmare to the Russian people.
Stalin used the murder as a pretext to claim that a huge and wide-ranging plot
had been uncovered to assassinate not only Kirov, but Molotov and himself as
well. A campaign was launched against party members whom he distrusted or
disliked for some reason, and from 1936 until 1938 this was intensified into what
became known as the Great Terror. The number of victims is still in dispute, but
even the more modest estimates put the total executed and sent to labour camps
at well over three million in the two years 1937 and 1938. The vast majority of
those sentenced to concentration and labour camps never returned.
What could possibly be the motives for such an extraordinary policy - a cam
paign of violence so unrestrained and so monstrous as to be almost beyond
belief? The traditional view, put forward by Robert Conquest, is that Stalin was
driven by his lust for power. ‘The one fundamental drive that can be found
throughout is the strengthening of his own position. To this, for practical
purposes, all else was subordinate. It led him to absolute power.’ Anybody
against whom Stalin had a personal grudge was automatically included on the
death list. But even Stalin could hardly have had personal grudges against four
million people. Conquest believes that Stalin's terror has to be looked at as a
mass phenomenon rather than in terms of individuals. The effect of terror is
produced in any group or society when a given proportion of that group has been
seized and shot. ‘The remainder will be cowed into uncomplaining obedience.
And it does not much matter,* from this point of view, which of them have been
i >■
\
selected as victims, particularly if all or almost all are innocent/59Political scientist
Zbigniew Brzezinski took a less personalized view, arguing that in any totalitarian
system where there are no genuinely democratic elections, continued random
purging is needed to keep people in a constant state of fear and uncertainty.60
Revisionist historian J. Arch Getty argues that the purges were really an extreme
form of political infighting at the top; he plays down the role of Stalin himself and
claims that it was the obsessive fears of all the leaders which generated the ter
ror.61 Sheila Fitzpatrick suggests that the purges must be seen in the context of a
continuing revolution. ‘Suspicion of enemies - in the pay of foreign powers,
often masked, involved in constant conspiracies to destroy the revolution and
inflict misery on the people - is a standard feature of revolutionary mentality...
In normal circumstances, people reject the idea that it is better that ten innocent
men perish than that one guilty man go free; in the abnormal circumstances of
revolution, they often accept it.’62 And there was the added advantage that sen
sational purges would divert attention away from the country’s economic and
social problems. On a more mundane level, the purges made room for the
promotion of ambitious party apparatchiks.
Ironically some of the most recent evidence to emerge from the Soviet archives
seems to bear out the simple traditional view that Stalin’s ambition and paranoia
were responsible. Dmitri Volkogonov reached the conclusion that Stalin had an
exceptionally evil mind, that there was a gap in his personality where the moral
sense should have been. This moral gap in the personality ‘can reduce even a
powerful mind to the functions of a calculating machine, a logical mechanism to
the level of a rational but pitiless apparatus.’ He went on to argue that the chief
responsibility for all the horrors of the terror rested with Stalin. It was Stalin who
personally gave Yezhov instructions on the direction and scale of the repressions,
and he approved long lists of people to be executed. This went on until 1938, when
Stalin seemed to have become bored with this procedure, and thereafter gave
courts and tribunals the right to decide for themselves.63There is no real evidence
that Stalin felt himself in danger; early in 1939, when he felt that the terror had
served its purpose, it was Stalin who quite calmly called a halt Of course, he
needed help in his extraordinary campaign; his two most faithful assistants,
Molotov and Kaganovitch, seem to have been very similar in mentality. Molotov,
who survived everything and lived to the ripe old age of 96, was unrepentant to the
end. ‘In the main it was the guilty, those who needed to be repressed to one
degree or another, who were punished,’he said forty years later. ‘Obviously one or
two out of ten were wrongly sentenced, but the rest got their just desserts.'64
And it was the murder of Sergei Mironovich Kirov on 1 December 1934 which
became the starting point of the Great Purges. This murder, according to Robert
Conquest, ‘has every right to be called the crime of the century. Over the next
four years, hundreds of Soviet citizens, including the most prominent political
leaders of the Revolution, were shot for direct responsibility for the assassin
ation, and literally millions of others went to their deaths for complicity in one or
another part of the vast conspiracy which allegedly lay behind it. Kirov’s death, in
fact, was the keystone of the entire edifice of terror and suffering by which Stalin
secured his grip on the Soviet peoples.’65 Although it is probably not possible at
this distance in time to prove it conclusively, there seems little doubt that Stalin

himself was responsible for Kirov’s death. The official Soviet version, held from
1938 until 1956, was that Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky had ordered the murder,
and that Yagoda, who was head of the NKVD (The People’s Commissariat of
Internal Affairs), had arranged for the murderer to be given uninterrupted access
to his victim. Conquest argues that Yagoda had indeed been involved but that it was
Stalin who had given the orders, not directly but through certain intermediaries.
The circumstances surrounding the murder were certainly suspicious. In the
preceding six weeks Nikolaev had twice been arrested by Kirov’s bodyguards for
threatening behaviour, and twice the NKVD had released him, even though he
was carrying a loaded pistol. Just before the killing, Kirov’s bodyguards mysteri
ously disappeared, although they had been seen with him at the Smolny
entrance. Borisov, the leader of the bodyguard, who was known to be devoted to
Kirov and who had thwarted the two earlier attempts on Kirov’s life, was
reported as having been killed in a motor accident as he was being taken for
questioning; but in 1956 two of the doctors who had signed his death certificate
admitted that he had died from being beaten on the head with iron bars.
Nikolaev himself was executed without being questioned too deeply, and sev
eral others, including the men who had killed Borisov, were also shot soon after
wards. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Stalin was deeply involved; it
was all so convenient: Kirov’s murder destroyed his most influential rival, and
the blame could be laid on his other rivals and critics. On the day of the murder,
even before any investigation had begun, a new decree was issued on Stalin's
orders giving the NKVD full authority to arrest and try all those accused of acts
of terror; death sentences must be carried out immediately; there was no right of
appeal and no possibility of a pardon. This decree was published beforë the
Politburo had even seen it
The first important victims of the new purge were Kamenev and Zinoviev; on
16 January 1935 they were both found guilty of complicity in Kirov’s murder;
Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and Kamenev toNfive years.
This was followed by literally thousands of arrests in Leningrad, in which hun
dreds of supporters of Zinoviev (who had earlier been the Leningrad party boss)
and anybody considered to be enemies of the Communists were rounded up;
many were former nobles who were guilty of nothing except belonging to the
wrong social class. Over 30,000 people were deported to Siberia from Leningrad
alone, and there were similar purges in other cities. There is evidence that after
this first wave of terror the remaining Politburo moderates, particularly Valerian
Kuibyshev, argued against any further purges. However, on 26 January Kuibyshev
died suddenly from a heart-attack; later it was suggested that he had been murdered
by his doctors who deliberately gave him the wrong medical treatment, on the
orders of Yagoda. Either way, it was another convenient death for Stalin, and the
hard line continued. In May 1935 a letter was sent from the Central Committee to
all regional party organizations calling for the rooting out of ‘enemies of the Party
and the working class’ who still held party membership cards. Within a few
weeks over 280,000 people had their membership cards taken away and were in
effect expelled from the party. New and stricter penalties were introduced for
certain offences: anyone leaving the country without permission autoniatically
incurred the death penalty and relatives of the culprit were to be arrested; all
\
penalties, including death, were to apply to children aged twelve and over. This
was to give Stalin an extra weapon in his struggle against the opposition: he
could now threaten their children if they refused to co-operate. According to
Conquest, by mid-1935 'Stalin had men of his personal selection, who were to
prove themselves complete devotees of the Purge, in control of Leningrad
[Andrei Zhdanov] and Moscow [Nikita Khrushchev], and in the Transcaucasus,
where Beria ruled; in the Control Commission and the key departments of the
Party Secretariat, and in the Prosecutor-Generalship.’66 Discussion still took
place in the Politburo, but it had almost reached the point where nobody dared
to make a strong stand against Stalin. Apparently even Kaganovitch and Molotov
were not strongly in favour of a continuation of the purges, but Stalin was deter
mined to press on.
(c) The Great Terror, 1936-38

In the summer of 1936 the NKVD claimed to have discovered evidence that
Trotsky had been in touch with a wide range of people - students, Komsomol
members and Old Bolsheviks - all plotting to murder Stalin. Most of the evidence
seems to have been fabricated, as Stalin must have been aware, but it was
enough to justify the launching of a bloody campaign. Kamenev and Zinoviev
were the first to come under attack; they were brought from prison and dealt
with in the first of the great show-trials, along with a group of so-called Trotsky-
ites. They were pressurized to confess that they had organized an Anti-Soviet
Trotskyist-Zinovievite Centre. At first they refused, but after threats that Kame
nev’s son would be shot, and promises from Stalin that their lives would be
spared if they complied, they both confessed. In August 1936 they were found
guilty, sentenced to death and shot the following day. These were the first
executions of Old Bolsheviks who had been right at the top of the party and the
government; and it was the first breach of the unwritten rule that Bolsheviks
should not kill their own colleagues. But Stalin had got away with it and there was
no stopping him now. Kamenev’s wife and elder son, and Zinoviev’s son were
arrested and eventually shot. Some of the evidence given during the trial impli
cated Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky. Vyshinsky, the chief prosecutor, ordered an
investigation into their activities. After a stormy meeting between Tomsky and
Stalin, Tomsky shot himself. Apparently most of the general public accepted
these events at face value. Throughout the trial the press carried lurid reports
giving the impression that the entire country was in the grip of Trotskyite
plotters. The newspapers now began to demand the death penalty for Bukharin
and Rykov. Volkogonov claims that Stalin gradually created this atmosphere of
suspicion; 'the constant massage of the public mind produced results, and the
people became indignant when they heard about the baseness of those who had
managed to stay out of sight for so long.'67 Even if they found the confessions
astonishing, there were very few people now who dared voice what they were
thinking.
Only a few days after the executions Stalin ordered Yagoda, the head of the
NKVD, to pick out five thousand political oppositionists - Trotskyites, Old
Bolsheviks and Zinovievites - who were already in labour camps and have them

shot. In September Yagoda himself was removed on the grounds that he had
been too lax in rooting out enemies of the people; he was replaced by Nikolai
Yezhov, one of Stalin's favourites. It was Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Stalin's old Mend
from Georgia, who made the final attempt to moderate the terror. As Commissar
for heavy industry, Ordzhonikidze had consistently objected to the extension of
the purges into the economic sphere. Accusations of sabotage, mass arrests of
managers and workers, and the constant raising of targets were, in his view, not
the way to improve results; however, Molotov and Kaganovitch could usually
be relied on to support Stalin against him in the Politburo. Ordzhonikidze had
opposed Stalin on other occasions as well. Robert Conquest's theory is that Stalin
now decided to undermine Ordzhonikidze's position. Yuri Piatakov, Ordzhonikidze's
deputy and close Mend, was arrested and put on trial along with Karl Radek and
a group of fifteen other prominent communists, charged with leading a totally
imaginary Parallel Anti-Sovîèt Trotskyist Centre and planning terrorist acts,
including the murder of Kirov. This was the second of the great show-trials and it
ended in the usual way - no convincing evidence was produced, and yet the
defendants all made full confessions; most of them were sentenced to death and
shot (January 1937). On 19 February, after several uncontrollably angry conver
sations with Stalin, Ordzhonikidze shot himself. He had been heard to say to
Stalin that he could not share the responsibility for what he had no power to pre
vent, and that he would not become a corrupt timeserver. The press reported
that he had died of a heart-attack; it has also been suggested that he was shot on
Stalin's orders, although there seems to be no conclusive evidence of this.68
Stalin’s next target for radical purging was the army. In June 1937 Marshal
M.N. Tukhachevsky, one of the top generals in the Red Army and Deputy Com
missar for Defence, and several other generals were arrested and charged with
treason. They were tortured to make them sign confessions, Med in secret, found
guilty and shot immediately. This came as a surprise to the public since, unlike
the two big public show-Mals, the affair had received no previous publicity in the
press. Marshal K.Y. Voroshilov, one of Stalin's closest associates, and Commissar
for Defence, explained in a Pravda article that they had all confessed ‘their
treacherousness, wrecking and espionage.’ Evidence had been produced that
Tukhachevsky and his supporters had been planning a military coup. According
to Isaac Deutscher, 'the main part of the coup was to be a palace revolt in the
Kremlin, culminating in the assassination of Stalin. A decisive military operation
outside the Kremlin was also prepared. Tukhachevsky was the moving spmt of
the conspiracy.’69 Many historians do not believe in the existence of any conspir
acy; it was claimed that the incriminating documents had originated in Germany
during the course of Tukhachevsky’s plotting with the German secret service, but
the evidence was never made public. One theory is that the documents were
fabricated by the Gestapo in order to try and weaken the Soviet army. Another
idea is that they were forged by anti-Soviet émigré Russians living in Paris.
If there was no plot, why did Stalin launch his attack on the army, which until
then had seemed to be largely immune from the purges? Perhaps Stalin was
genuinely afraid of a military coup, which he well knew was the only way he
could be removed by 1937. By sMking first at the generals most likely to oppose
him, Stalin would encourage the rest to behave themselves. There was probably
\
also a personal motive: Tukhachevsky was by far the most intelligent and
forward-looking of the Red Army generals and had a distinguished military
career in the Civil War. Unfortunately he did not get on with Voroshilov:
Tukhachevsky was well-informed about the latest military thinking and about
ways of avoiding the horrific stalemate caused by trench warfare in the First
World War. He wanted the Soviet army to follow the German practice of building
up mechanized units with motorized transports and tanks which would be
capable of either launching a swift invasion of enemy territory or delivering a
decisive counter-attack against an enemy invasion of the USSR. However,
Voroshilov, who was Tukhachevsky's political superior, dismissed the new ideas;
he did not believe that a rapid victory would be possible and insisted that the
USSR should prepare for a long defensive war in which infantry and artillery, not
motorized divisions, were the crucial element. Stalin knew about the disagree
ments; some sources claim that he had grown to dislike Tukhachevsky for his
independence, arrogance and progressive ideas.70
The execution of Tukhachevsky and the seven other generals was only the
beginning of a wholesale attack on the army. It is said that Stalin killed more
generals and commanders than perished in the Second World War: 15 out of 16
top generals, 60 out of 67 corps commanders, and 136 out of 199 divisional
commanders were executed. In addition, about 37,000 officers were arrested
and mostly sent to labour camps. In many cases their wives and families suf
fered too; Tukhachevsky’s wife and two brothers were arrested and shot, his
three sisters were sent to labour camps, and his daughter was arrested later
when she came of age and given a five-year sentence in a labour camp. At the
same time there was a similar purge of the top ranks of the navy. In 1938 there
was a second wave of arrests and executions in which many officers who had
replaced those slaughtered in 1937 now perished themselves. Whatever else all
this achieved, it did very little to help the country's security, especially as
Voroshilov cancelled Tukhachevsky's plans for building up motorized and tank
units (see section 7.2(a)).
The climax of the Great Terror was the third big political show-trial, known as
'the trial of the twenty-one’. It involved Nikolai Bukharin himself, together with
Rykov, a group of eighteen other Rightists, and ironically, Yagoda. Yezhov had
been preparing the case for most of 1937, and the trial eventually opened in
March 1938. The main charges were that they belonged to an anti-Soviet bloc of
Trotskyites, they had repeatedly organized acts of sabotage, and they were
spying for foreign powers. Bukharin and several of the others were determined
not to confess to crimes they had not committed; Bukharin stoutly denied that
he had been involved in the murder of Kirov or that he had been working as a spy
for foreign intelligence services. However, after Stalin ordered Yezhov to use ‘all
means’, threats were made against Bukharin’s wife and nine-month old son.
Bukharin crumbled immediately and agreed to sign anything. Eighteen of the
defendants, including Bukharin, Rykov and Yagoda, were sentenced to death
and executed the next day; the other three were given prison sentences ranging
from fifteen to twenty-five years.
These spectacular show-trials of leading political figures were only the tip of
the iceberg; in the background, week by week throughout 1937 and 1938, in the

hands of NKVD chief Yezhov, the Great Terror continued against literally
hundreds of thousands of ordinary people. Although the campaign was directed
from the centre, there was a great deal of scope for local initiative; it was the job
of the local NKVD officials to decide who were the class enemies. Managers,
engineers and administrators were prime targets, and ordinary workers were not
safe: engine drivers were sometimes shot if their trains were late, or if they drove
too fast or too slowly. Lorry drivers were arrested for driving too fast and there
fore using too much petrol. Other groups at risk were priests, kulaks who had
gone to work in industry, anybody who had a ‘doubtful' background (for
example, sons and daughters of priests and kulaks) and the ‘former people* from
the old privileged classes. Ordinary people were encouraged to denounce or
‘unmask* class enemies; soon workers began to get revenge on unpopular man
agers and foremen by denouncing them for incompetence or harassment and
then testifying against them in local trials. Another favourite group for denun
ciation were arrogant or unhelpful local officials. The government also began to
introduce a sort of social cleansing by arresting what were described as ‘degener
ates’ whose presence was said to be corrupting and disruptive; these included
prostitutes, beggars, travelling tinkers and tailors, and gypsies. In one sweep in
the summer of 1933 about 5000 gypsies were arrested in the Moscow region and
sent to a labour colony at Tomsk in Siberia. Recently released documents from
the Soviet archives suggest that the social cleansing of ‘marginals* went further
than Western historians had previously thought. Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown
that in 1937-38 the regime began a policy of rounding up criminals, trouble
makers, and people who had returned from exile illegally. Each region was given
a quota; the total target figure for the USSR was 200,000 to be sent to labour
camps and 70,000 to be executed.71 Paul Hagenloh argues that in one sense this
was separate from the party, industrial and military purges which were taking
place at the time; it was the culmination of a decade-long police campaign
against all kinds of people - the misfits of society ‘who did not or could not fit
into the emerging Stalinist system.' These were not tightly controlled political
purges, but are best understood as ‘chaotic, poorly planned, brutal police cam
paigns intended to eliminate the social by-products of the upheavals associated
with collectivization and forced industrialization.’72
By the summer of 1938 Stalin had decided that the terror must end soon;
perhaps he thought it was threatening to get out of control. He began to prepare
the ground so that an official announcement could be made at the Eighteenth
Party Congress in March 1939. Stalin planned to make Yezhov the scapegoat
and in October 1938 he was replaced by Lavrenti Beria; about a year later
Yezhov was arrested and shot. Beria soon purged most of Yezhov's staff at the
NKVD and replaced them with his own appointments who were equally vicious.
All the blame for the Great Terror was laid on the excesses of Yezhov and his
subordinates. Stalin himself remarked later: ‘that scoundrel Yezhov! He finished
off some of our finest people. He was utterly rotten... that's why we shot him.'
In this way Stalin succeeded in diverting responsibility for the terror away from
himself and kept at least a certain level of popularity. Addressing the Party
Congress in March 1939 he admitted that mistakes had been made but claimed
that they were not too serious.* He told the delegates that the party membership
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had shrunk by over a quarter of a million since the previous Congress in 1934,
but he made no mention of what had become of those who were no longer
members. ‘But there is nothing bad in that,’ he said. ‘Our Party is now some
what smaller in membership, but on the other hand it is better in quality. This is
a great achievement.’73 There was still one major piece of unfinished business:
Trotsky was still at large, though he was living in exile in a suburb of Mexico
City. He had continued to infuriate Stalin by publishing a constant stream of
articles and letters in the Western press criticizing Stalin’s policies with his
usual biting wit and sarcasm. In a 1938 article Trotsky wrote: ‘Trotsky has only
to blink an eye and it is enough for the veterans of the revolution to become
agents for Hitler... railwaymen destroy military transports in the Far East, while
highly respected doctors poison their patients in the Kremlin. This is the amaz
ing picture drawn by Vyshinsky, but here a difficulty arises. In a totalitarian
regime it is the apparatus which implements the dictatorship. But if my hire
lings are operating all the key posts in the apparatus, how is it that Stalin is in
the Kremlin and I’m in exile?' Stalin had had enough of this sort of thing, and in
April 1940 he told Beria to get on with the job of disposing of Trotsky. In August
1940 a young man who was a friend of one of Trotsky’s secretaries and who was
trusted by the family, entered Trotsky’s study. He was, in fact, employed by the
NKVD and had been chosen as the assassin. He took out an ice-axe and struck
Trotsky on the head with all his strength; Trotsky died 24 hours later. The
delighted Stalin promoted Beria to the position of General Commissar of State
Security.
What was the reaction of ordinary people to the purges? It is important to
realize that on the whole people were not aware at the time of the vast scale of
the purges. Many of those who did not themselves suffer believed that the
victims were guilty and deserved to be punished. Often the reaction of workers
was concern lest their corrupt managers got off too lightly. Most people had
experienced incompetent and deliberately unco-operative local officials and had
no sympathy for them when they were arrested. Peasants, especially those who
had suffered personal hardship during collectivization, were pleased for a different
reason: they were delighted that there were so many enemies of Soviet power
around. But many ordinary members of the general public simply did not believe
that so many people could be guilty of deliberate ‘wrecking’ and espionage. The
inimitable Russian sense of humour survived unscathed and a wide variety of
grim jokes circulated. In one of the stories Stalin lost his pipe. He telephoned the
NKVD and ordered them to find it immediately. Two hours later he found the
pipe himself - it had fallen into one of his boots next to the sofa in his apartment.
He telephoned the NKVD again and asked what progress had been made. ‘We
have arrested ten men already,' he was told, ‘and the investigation is continuing.’
‘As it happens,’ said Stalin, T have found my pipe, so free them instantly.’ ‘But
Comrade Stalin,’ came the reply, ‘seven of them have already confessed!’ Another
story which came in several variants concerned a group of rabbits who turned up
at the frontier with Poland in the hope of being admitted. When asked why they
wanted to leave the USSR they replied: ‘The NKVD has given orders to arrest
every camel in the Soviet Union.' ‘But you are not camels.’ ‘Yes, we know that,’
said the rabbits, ‘but we can’t prove it.'

(d) The aftermath of the Purges and the Great Terror
The main victim was Lenin's old Bolshevik/Communist party, which more or
less ceased to exist. Although the political forms remained much the same, the
party was now completely different even from that of 1934; the power of the old
Bolshevik elite had been eliminated. By the time the Party Congress met in
March 1939, nearly 80 per cent of the Central Committee (98 out of 139) elected
at the 1934 Congress had been arrested and shot. Sixty per cent of those who had
been party members in 1934 had been expelled from the party. Over 80 per cent
of the party elite in 1934 had joined the party before 1921; in 1939 that percentage
had fallen to only 19. At the end of 1940 the only survivor among the 14 members
of Lenin’s first government was Stalin; only four of them died a natural death,
five were executed during the purges, three died in labour camps and Trotsky
was murdered. The army and the intelligentsia had also suffered and so had tens
of thousands of ordinary, innocent people. Non-Russian groups, especially those
like Poles, Koreans and Kurds, who had compatriots living outside the USSR,
were removed from their homelands and deported to Kazakhstan where they
would be less likely to cause trouble in the event of war. Historians are still
arguing about how many people fell victim to the purges. Robert Conquest gave
relatively high figures: just for the years 1937-38 he estimated about seven
million arrests, about one million executed, two million who died in the camps,
about eight million in camps at the end of 1938 (this was assuming five million in
camps at the end of 1936), and about one million in prison. He also estimated
that of those in the camps, not more than ten per cent survived. Other writers
argued that these estimates were too high; Jerry Hough, for example, cläimed
that executions and prison deaths were, at most, a few hundred thousand or
even a few tens of thousands in 1937-38, and that ordinary everyday life was not
affected. In the early 1990s official KGB figures were released which show that in
the two years 1937-38 just under 700,000 people were executed and tjiat at the
end of the 1930s there were about 3.6 million in labour camps and prison. Ronald
Suny points out that if you add the four to five million people who perished in the
famine of 1932-33 to the total figures of those executed and exiled during the
1930s, ‘the total number of lives destroyed in the 1930s runs from ten to eleven
million.’ A similar conclusion was reached by S.G. Wheatcroft and R.W. Davies
who calculated that ‘the total number of excess deaths in 1927-38 may have
amounted to some 10 million persons, 8.5 million in 1927-36, and about 1-1.5
million in 1937-38.’74
There can be no doubt that the purges left the USSR in a seriously weakened
condition. Economically, militarily and intellectually, the country was worse off
than it had been in 1928. In the words of Robert Service: ‘The blood-purge of the
armed forces disrupted the USSR's defences in a period of intense international
tension. The arrest of the economic administrators in the people’s commissar
iats impeded industrial output. The destruction of cadres in party, trade unions
and local government undermined administrative co-ordination... Stalin had
started the carnage of 1937-38 because of real hostility to his policies, real threats
to his authority, a real underlying menace to the compound of Soviet order.
Yet his reaction was hysterically out of proportion to the menace he faced.’75
i »
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Nevertheless, from Stalin's point of view, the internal menace was now at an end:
the central government, local government, government in the republics, the
army and navy, and the nation's economic structures had all been violently sub
dued; power was concentrated in the hands of Stalin who ruled unchallenged,
with the help of his supporting clique (Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Zhdanov,
Voroshilov, Bulganin, Beria, Malenkov and Khrushchev) until his death in 1953.
(e) The Constitution of 1936

Ironically, in November 1936, in the midst of the campaign urging Communists
to unmask hidden enemies, the mass arrests, the trials and the purges, a new
constitution was introduced. It was known as the Stalin Constitution, although
it had mostly been drafted by Bukharin and Radek, and the regime claimed that
it was the most democratic constitution in the world. It certainly looked demo
cratic on paper; it stated that the USSR was a federation of eleven Soviet
Socialist Republics: Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Kazakhstan, Kirgizia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tadzikhistan, plus a
number of autonomous areas and regions. The union (or federal) government in
Moscow controlled defence, foreign policy and budgetary matters, but the
republics controlled some of their own internal affairs (see section 6.6(i)). Any
republic could leave the union if it so desired. The main law-making body was
the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, which had two houses: the Soviet of the Union
consisted of members elected by electoral constituencies in which one member
represented 300,000 people; the Soviet of Nationalities consisted of 25 members
from each union republic plus some extras from the autonomous republics and
regions. The franchise (the right to vote) was to be universal, which meant that
'former people' such as ex-nobles, kulaks, priests and White Army officers who
had been deprived of the vote were now enfranchised again. There were to be
universal civil rights such as freedom of thought, the press, religion, organization
and public assembly, and the right to work. In fact ‘work in the USSR’ said the
Constitution, ‘is a duty and a matter of honour for every able-bodied citizen, in
accordance with the principle: “He who does not work shall not eat".’A new social
and economic order had been built, according to Stalin, in which there were only
three classes - the working class, the peasantry and the working intelligentsia, by
which he meant anybody in a managerial, educational or administrative job. Since
the capitalist system had been eliminated and the means of production were
no longer privately owned, any exploitation of workers by capitalists had ceased
to exist.
In practice, however, very little of the so-called democracy seemed to come
through. The elections, which were to be held every four years, were not compet
itive - there was only one candidate to vote for in each constituency, and that was
the Communist Party candidate. Stalin justified this on the grounds that there was
no need for a multi-party system in a state where there were no conflicting classes.
The Communist Party represented everybody’s best interests. The aim of the
candidates at elections was to get as near as possible to 100 per cent of the votes,
thereby showing that the government’s policies were widely popular. The
Supreme Soviet only met twice a year for a few days each time, when the

government presented its policies for approval; the Supreme Soviet did not actu
ally make the laws - it simply rubber-stamped whatever the government told it. Its
members then reported back to their districts about what was happening at the
centre. The other function of the Supreme Soviet was to elect two smaller bodies:
the Presidium, whose chairman acted as President of the USSR, a figurehead posi
tion which carried no real power; and the Council of People’s Commissars, which
had more power. The Commissars were heads of departments and formed a sort of
cabinet; in a sense, however, they were more bureaucrats than politicians.
Although it was not specifically stated in the Constitution, the real power remained
with the Politburo, the leading body of the Communist Party. According to Article
126, ‘the most active and most politically conscious citizens... unite in the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which is the vanguard of the working people
in their struggle to strengthen and develop the socialist system and is the leading
core of all the public and state organizations of the working people.’ In fact no
party congress was called between 1939 and 1952; all important decisions were
taken in the Politburo, and Stalin, as its general secretary, seemed to act very much
as a dictator. T.H. Rigby compares him to A1 Capone - he was good at ‘keeping the
boys in line’, and this meant keeping them intimidated.76 Amazingly, even
Molotov’s wife was arrested on Stalin’s orders in 1939 and kept in prison for a time.
Not surprisingly, very few people in the USSR took the 1936 Constitution seriously.
(f) Was the Stalinist regime totalitarian?

There has been great and sometimes acrimonious controversy among historians
about the exact nature of Stalin’s regime and its relationship with society. The
traditional critical Western liberal-democratic view held by historians such as
Adam Ulam, Robert Conquest and Leonard Schapiro, was that Stalin’s regime
was totalitarian, in many ways like Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany. A ‘perfect’
totalitarian regime is one in which there is dictatorial rule in a one-party state
which totally controls all activities - economic, intellectual, political and cultural;
all activities are directed towards achieving the state’s goals, which are decided
by the dictator. Every individual is considered to be the property of the state, and
the interests of the individual are subordinate to the interests and requirements
of the state. Obviously the state will not be able to control absolutely all human
activities - it will have difficulty, for example, with family matters, emotional and
sexual relationships, and private thoughts and opinions on things like politics,
culture and religion. But a genuine totalitarian regime will strive to extend its
control to the limits by attempting to indoctrinate everybody with the party
ideology and to mobilize society in its support. Inherent in this kind of system is
the use of both mental and physical terror and violence to crush opposition and
keep the regime in power. There is ample evidence of all these characteristics at
work in Stalin’s system: the dominating role of Stalin himself in policy and
decision making - especially collectivization, dekulakization, the suppression of
information about the famine in 1932-33, the Purges and the Great Terror; the
personality cult which portrayed Stalin as ‘The Father of the Peoples', ‘The Great
Helmsman’, ‘The Greatest Genius in History’, ‘Shining Sun of Humanity’ and
other equally absurd titles; the awesome power of the state in the economic sphere;
\
the gradual coalescing between the party and the state, and the ever-growing
party bureaucracy; the control of the press, the arts and religion; the constant
propaganda and attempts at indoctrination at all levels of society; and above all
the executions, the overflowing prisons and the labour camps with their atro
cious conditions and high death rates.
On the other hand, during the 1970s, ‘revisionist’ Western historians, among
whom Sheila Fitzpatrick was one of the leaders, began to look at the Stalin
period from a social viewpoint. They criticized the ‘totalitarian’ historians on
the grounds that they ignored social history and presented society as the passive
victim of state policies, whereas in fact, during the late 1920s and 1930s the
regime was supported by many people who benefited from the system. These
included officials in the party-state bureaucracy, the army and the trade unions,
members of the Komsomol, administrators, experts and key industrial workers -
in other words, the new elite. The social historians suggested that to some extent
certain groups in society were able to show ‘initiatives from below’ and even
negotiate and bargain with the regime, so that they were able to influence
policy. Yet another twist occurred during the 1980s when a group of historians,
notably the American J. Arch Getty, criticized the totalitarian historians for
exaggerating the personal dictatorship and role of Stalin and the extent to which
the one-party state operated as an efficient centralized system of control. Getty
claims that Stalin was not much more than a power-broker trying to manoeuvre
his colleagues, who stumbled into policies almost by accident; the party, far
from being a highly organized and finely honed instrument, was inefficient,
chaotic and unco-operative. By the mid-1930s Stalin had actually lost control of
the party.77 Most controversially, this group of historians, which also includes
Roberta Manning and G.T. Ritterspoom, plays down the role of Stalin in the
Great Terror, seeing it as the outcome of a series of circumstances which ‘boiled
over’ almost unintentionally.
The basic difference between the various groups is that the totalitarianists
emphasize the total ruthlessness of the Stalinist regime in its determination to
impose its policies on society regardless of all opposition, while the rest, includ
ing the so-called social historians or ‘structuralists', believe that the regime was
moulded by institutional, economic and social pressures from below, which
caused its policies to be modified if they became too unpopular. The totalitarian
writers criticized the others, especially Arch Getty and those who took a similar
line, because they felt that they were attempting to whitewash Stalin; they
accused them of trying to gloss over the downright criminal and evil aspects of
his policies. On the other hand the structuralists accused the totalitarians of
refusing to give fair and objective consideration to the Communist System and
the processes which formed it, simply because their own political Cold War
prejudices would not allow them to concede that anything good could come out
of a socialist system.
Now that the dust has settled somewhat and historians have had time to digest
the new information emerging from the archives, it is possible to arrive at a more
balanced conclusion. It seems clear that there are elements of truth in both these
interpretations. It is impossible to ignore the central role of Stalin himself:
overwhelmingly the evidence suggests that increasingly after 1928, it was Stalin’s

policy preferences that were carried out, until by 1936 he had acquired the
powers of à dictator. As EA. Rees puts it: ‘the depiction of Stalin as a pragmatist,
an organizational man, who responded to evolving political circumstances and
pressures with no conceived plan, initiating policies which had unforeseen con
sequences, reflects an under-estimation of his central role.’78 On the other hand
the regime could not completely ignore public opinion - even Stalin needed and
wanted to feel popular; he needed and secured the support of the new elite
groups, the younger people who had been promoted. And it was these groups,
mainly from worker and peasant backgrounds, who were participants in, rather
than victims of, Stalinism. There is evidence too that although the regime had
totalitarian aims, in practice it was far from successful. Streams of orders issued
forth from the top, which would have been obeyed without question in a genu
inely totalitarian state. But this was not the case in the USSR: whether through
fear, or apathy, or hostility, as both Donald Filtzer and Sheila Fitzpatrick have
shown, peasants and workers found ways of resisting and evading government
orders.79 The more the government tried to tighten controls, the more counter
productive its efforts became; there was conflict between the centre and the
regional leaderships; attempts to control the media and suppress information
about, for example, the excesses of dekulakization and the horrors of the famine,
must have struck a jarring note with millions of people who knew the truth from
their own experiences. The Stalinist system was over-centralized, disorganized,
inefficient, corrupt, sluggish and unresponsive.
Finally it has to be said that there is a danger in this academic debate, in
the preoccupation with the extent to which pressures from society shaped the
regime, of forgetting that looming over the entire system were the Purges and
the Terror. Concentrating on social history can give the impression that everyday
life under Stalin was a normal sort of existence. But this was not the case. Martin
Malia argues in a recent review article that the revisionists make too much of the
so-called ‘negotiation' between state power and the people. For the vastmajority
of people, the concept of negotiating with, or attempting to influence the regime
simply did not arise. Nobody was safe, not even members of the elite; in fact in
the earlier rounds of the purges the party elite suffered proportionately more
than anybody else. The term ‘negotiation,' Malia points out, ‘carries connota
tions of equality and normality incongruous in a situation of institutionalized
terror.'80Even Sheila Fitzpatrick herself acknowledges the all-pervasive nature of
Stalinist violence: ‘Terror - meaning state violence against groups and randomly
chosen citizens - was so frequently used that it must be regarded as a systemic
characteristic of Stalinism in the 1930s... Anybody could be exposed as “an enemy
of the people"; the enemies, like witches in earlier ages, bore no reliable external
marks.’81 Extremely inefficient the regime may well have been, but it still suc
ceeded in being extremely murderous.
6.6 Everyday life and culture under Stalin

As we saw at the end of the previous section, everyday life in the USSR during the
1930s was dominated by the state, which controlled, or attempted to control, as
\
much of human activity as possible. Ordinary people could not avoid contact
with the state - being educated, finding a job, getting promotion, getting married
and bringing up children, finding somewhere to live, shopping, travelling, read
ing literature, going to the theatre and concerts, enjoying the visual arts, practis
ing your religion, reading the news, listening to the radio - in all these activities
people ran up against the state. The communists had a mission - to eradicate
‘backwardness’; most things belonging to pre-revolution Russia were viewed as
backward - like small-scale peasant farming, the illiteracy of the peasants and
many of the poorer working class, private trade, petty bourgeois culture, and
religion, which was dismissed as superstition. The Soviet state must become
modernized and socialist, and the new Soviet citizen must be educated and
‘cultured’. The state considered that it was the duty of artists, musicians and
writers to play their part in the attack on bourgeois values by producing works of
‘socialist realism’which glorified the Soviet system. They were to be ‘engineers of
the soul,’ as Stalin put it, helping to indoctrinate the population with socialist
values. This placed all artists under tremendous pressure, since it was not always
clear exactly what was ‘socialist’ and acceptable to Stalin.
(a) A hard life

These were impressive ideals, but by all accounts the most striking thing about
everyday life in the 1930s was that everything, including food, seemed to be in
short supply. This was partly because of the concentration on heavy industry at
the expense of consumer goods, and because of the famine of 1932-33, followed
by bad harvests later in the decade. People no longer talked about ‘buying’ some
thing, but about ‘getting hold of it. If they saw a queue, they would join it first
and then ask what was on offer. In 1933, the worst year, the average married
worker in Moscow consumed less than half the amount of bread and flour that
his counterpart had consumed around 1900. From all over the country there
were reports of people having to queue from the early hours of the morning to
get hold of a loaf. Meat, vegetables and fruit were also hard to come by, and so
were clothing and shoes, and household goods such as pans, kettles and cutlery.
Even when they were available, the quality of manufactured goods was usually
poor. In 1937 average real wages were about three-fifths of what they had been
in 1928.
Other hardships were caused by the rapid growth of the urban population
which brought serious housing shortages and placed untold strain on town
amenities. Between 1926 and 1939 the population of Moscow grew from 2 million
to 3.6 million, while Sverdlovsk (formerly Yekaterinburg), an industrial city in the
Urals, mushroomed from under 150,000 to over half a million. Magnitogorsk, the
new metallurgical centre in the Urals, which did not exist in 1926, had grown to
over 100,000 in 1939. In total, the urban population increased by 31 million
between 1926 and 1939. The local Soviet controlled all the housing in a town and
decided how much space a person was entitled to; in Moscow in 1930 this was
fixed at 5.5 square metres per head, although in 1940 it dropped to about
4 square metres. The Soviet had the power to evict residents and move new
residents into houses already occupied; it was common for middle-class families

living in large houses to be told that they were taking up too much space and to
find their home suddenly transformed into a 'communal apartment* as two or
three other families were moved in. Kitchens, bathrooms and toilets were shared
between families, and most large houses had people living in corridors and
under staircases. Even less fortunate were the workers who lived in barracks. At
Magnitogorsk in 1938 half the housing consisted of barracks, which was the usual
accommodation for unmarried workers and students. One barracks in Moscow
in 1932 housed 550 men and women, and the space worked out at 2 square
metres per tenant. City conditions were generally poor; most of them lacked
effective sewage systems, running water, electric lights and street lights. Zara
Witkin, an American engineer working in the USSR in the early 1930s, wrote: ‘the
physical aspect of the cities is dreadful. Stench, filth, dilapidation batter the
senses at every turn.*
Getting to work in most cities could be a nightmare. In Leningrad the trams
were dilapidated and always hopelessly overcrowded, and in most other cities
and large towns public transport was limited. For example, Pskov, a city of
60,000 people half-way between Riga and Leningrad, had no paved roads in
1939, no trams and only two buses. The exception to this grim situation was
Moscow itself where the government made a real effort to make the capital city
something to be proud of. There was an efficient system of trams and buses, and
by 1940 three-quarters of the inhabitants had sewage systems and running
water. The showpiece was the Moscow underground, opened in the mid-1930s,
which boasted deep escalators and spacious stations complete with chandeliers
and murals.
One of the most irritating aspects of everyday life for the majority of people
was that there were certain privileged groups who seemed to escape the worst of
the hardships. These included members of the party, important government and
trade union officials, members of the intelligentsia-writers, composers, artists and
so on who fulfilled their duty and produced acceptable works of sociahrealism,
engineers and other technical experts, and shockworkers and Stakhanovites.
Privileges took the form of extra food parcels, deliveries of bread to their homes,
separate works canteens, special stores where prices were usually lower, prefer
ential treatment in the provision of accommodation and dachas (country houses),
passes for long stays in rest homes and summer camps for their children. The
existence of such a privileged class resulted in a ‘them and us* attitude - ordinary
people felt aggrieved that they were still the underdogs. The propaganda con
stantly told them that power in the USSR belonged to the people - workers and
peasants. But in reality they felt excluded from power and resentful that they
were still being exploited; in a so-called socialist state, exploitation of one class
by another was no longer meant to exist. This is no doubt one reason why the
purges against members of the elite were popular in many quarters.82
How did people cope with these difficulties? Since the state shops were inade
quately stocked with goods, there was a flourishing illegal ‘second economy*
which in a way was a continuation of NEP private trading. This ranged from
large-scale operators who did deals with corrupt store and factory managers, to
individuals who bought a few metres of cloth, a few items of clothing or some
sausage, and sold them later for a small profit. But whatever the scale of the
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operation, this was a criminal offence, and the authorities labelled the culprits as
‘speculators’ - people who bought goods and sold them at a higher price. The
kolkhoz markets were a good place to take advantage of the second economy -
here it was legal for people to sell their own produce, but in fact all sorts of things
were bought and sold, and it was difficult for the authorities to enforce the rules.
Another coping strategy was the widespread use of the system known in Russian
as blat- which means something like ‘pull’ or ‘influence’ - a system of informal
networks of people who could do each other favours in the way of providing
goods and services. Somebody who worked in a factory or a warehouse might be
able to get hold of clothes, shoes, household goods or even flour and sugar;
somebody else might be able to arrange medical certificates, university entrance,
places in convalescent homes, somewhere to live; there were people who could
get hold of railway tickets, radio sets, firewood and fuel; and there were those
who could do engineering or building work. Although people were not usually
willing to talk openly about blat since it was frowned on by the authorities, it was
not an offence, and there is no doubt that it was widely practised.83
(b) Signs of improvement?

There is some evidence that life began to improve during the second half of the
1930s. In a speech in November 1935 Stalin told his audience of Stakhanovites:
‘Life has become better, life has become more joyous;’ this claim was taken up as
a motto and was even set to music. His statement was not entirely wishful
thinking: food supplies improved and all rationing was abolished in 1936. The
provision of cheap meals in factory canteens and free work clothes was a great
boon. Education and health care were free and the network of schools and
medical centres was spreading all the time during the 1930s. Soviet citizens who
left Russia during the Second World War usually mentioned this welfare-state
provision as one of the best aspects of life in the USSR. The government worked
hard at the concept of state paternalism - the idea that the population were like
children who must be looked after, protected and guided by the state which
acted as a sort of guardian. For example, the state provided facilities for leisure:
by the end of the 1930s there were close on 30,000 cinemas, there were sports
facilities for players and spectators - football, athletics, gymnastics and ice-hockey,
and there were public gardens and parks of culture - the largest and most famous
was Gorky Park in Moscow, named after Maxim. Also provided were ‘houses of
culture’ and libraries, and most towns of any size had a theatre.
Another important aspect of the state’s role was to encourage what the
Russians called kulturnosf - culturedness. This involved taking care with one’s
appearance, dress and personal hygiene - washing with soap, cleaning one’s
teeth and not spitting on the floor. Ordzhonikidze himself, the Commissar for
Industry, stressed the need for men to look tidy and shave regularly. Some indus
trial enterprises issued orders that all engineers and managers must make sure
that they were clean-shaven and had their hair properly cut. The workers’
barracks were a special target for improvement; these were viewed, in the words
of Vadim Volkov, as ‘repositories of deviance, violence, filth, offensive smells, and
coarse speech... “unculturedness” emanated from there.’ Gradually conditions

were improved by the use of partitions to divide the space up so that each person
had his own space. In March 1936 the Komsomol press launched a campaign
condemning ‘dirty talk’which, it was argued, was unacceptable from a ‘cultured’
person, and encouraging good table manners and correct behaviour in public.84
Other signs of culture were sleeping on sheets, eating with a knife and fork, and
not beating your wife and children. Household items encouraged as signs of cul
ture were curtains, lampshades and tablecloths. According to Stephen Kotkin, as
a person ascended to a higher level of culture, he learned to ‘speak Bolshevik’. In
other words, he learned all the rituals of being a genuine Soviet person and how
to conduct himself in the workplace. Not only did he not spit on the floor, he also
knew how to make a speech and propose a motion at a meeting, he understood
the basic tenets of Marxism and he was well-informed about the international
situation.85
The government extended ciilturedness to shopping: in the last few months of
1934 no fewer than 13,500 new bread shops opened across the country; the
assistants wore white smocks and caps and had lessons in how to be polite to the
customers. Strict new sanitary regulations were brought in and loaves had to be
wrapped. The campaign for cultured trade was aimed at every shop in the country,
from the largest Moscow department store to the smallest bread shop. Delegations
visited the USA, Britain and Germany to find out how the large stores operated.
They were most impressed with those in the USA, especially Macy’s in New York;
trying to copy what they had seen in America, the Russians set up ‘model’ stores
in most big cities, which were meant to serve as a pattern for others to follow.
Unfortunately, goods in these stores tended to be extremely expensive, sp that
only the privileged class could afford them. Life may well have been better for the
few, but for most ordinary Soviet citizens, the lavish commodity exhibitions in
the model department stores remained something to be gaped at in wonder.
(c) The state, women and the family

The 1930s were a difficult time for many families because of the ‘disappearance’
of so many men during collectivization, the famine and the purges. There was
a high desertion and divorce rate, and millions of women were left as the sole
breadwinner in the family. During the rapid industrialization of the 1930s more
than 10 million women became wage-earners for the first time, and the percent
age of women at work rose from 24 per cent to 39 per cent of the total paid work
force. By 1940 about two-thirds of the workforce in light industry were women,
and many were even engaged in heavier jobs such as construction, lumbering
and machine-building which were traditionally thought of as men's work. The
government faced the dilemma that it needed women to provide much of the
workforce for the industrialization drive, while at the same time it wanted to
encourage and strengthen the family unit. One way of coping was to build more
daycare centres and nurseries for children - the number of places doubled in the
two years 1929-30. In the mid-1930s new laws were passed encouraging women
to have as many children as possible; abortion was made illegal except in cases
where the mother's life was in danger; maternity leave of up to 16 weeks was
allowed and there were to be Various subsidies and other benefits for pregnant
\
women. Even so this placed a heavy burden on working-class and peasant
women, who were expected to produce children, take jobs, increase output and
look after the household and family.
Things were different for the more privileged women - wives of the elite and
educated women, either married or single, who had professional jobs. They were
seen by the state as part of its campaign to 'civilize' the masses. The movement
began in May 1936 with an All-Union Meeting of Wives of Industrialists and
Engineering Personnel held in the Kremlin and attended by Stalin. It was
followed by similar meetings of wives of members of other branches of industry,
of the Red Army and of the bureaucracy. The Wives’ Movement, as it became
known, was expected to do everything in its power to raise the culturedness of
the people its members came into contact with, particularly those in their
husbands’workplaces. Wives of managers were expected to brighten up workers’
barracks and dormitories with curtains, lampshades and carpets, organize study
groups and plant trees and flowers. Some went further and started child-minding
groups, literacy groups and libraries for their workers. But above all, their main
duty was to make a comfortable and well-organized home life for their husbands
and families. Towards the end of the 1930s, as war began to seem more likely, the
Wive’s Movement began to emphasize the need for women to learn to drive
lorries, shoot and even to fly planes, so that they would be ready to take men’s
places if they had to go off to war.86
(d) Education
One of the greatest achievements of the Stalinist regime was the expansion of
free, mass education. In 1917 under half the population could be described as
literate. In January 1930 the government announced that by the end of the
summer, all children aged eight to eleven must be enrolled in schools. Between
1929 and 1931 the number of pupils increased from 14 million to around 20 million,
and it was in rural areas, where education had been, to say the least, patchy, that
most of the increase took place. By 1940 there were 199,000 schools, and even the
most remote areas of the USSR were well provided. Lots of new training colleges
were set up specifically to train the new generation of teachers and lecturers.
According to the census of 1939, of people aged between 9 and 49, 94 per cent in
the towns and 86 per cent in rural areas were literate; by 1959 these percentages
had increased to 99 and 98 respectively. Of course the regime had an ulterior
motive - education was the way in which it could turn the younger generation
into good, orthodox Soviet citizens, with modern, cultured attitudes and values;
religion and other bourgeois practices were presented as superstitious and back
ward. Ironically, the educational experts decided that a return to traditional
teaching methods would be better than the experimental, more relaxed techniques
tried in the 1920s. These had included the abolition of examinations and punish
ments, and emphasis on project-work. All this began to be reversed from about
1931. Teachers were given more authority and were to impose strict discipline,
examinations and the old marking-systems were brought back and more teaching
time was to be spent on mathematics and science.

At the same time some elitist steps were taken: in 1932 the rule that universities
should take two-thirds of their entry from the working class and peasants was
dropped. This meant that it was easier for children of the elite class to gain
admission. In 1940 Stalin approved the introduction of fees for higher education
and for the final three years of secondary education. These final years were
voluntary anyway (the first seven years of education were still compulsory and
free), but the fees meant that it was mainly the children of better-off elite families
who could take advantage of the final three years.
(e) Religion
After Lenin’s attack on the Russian Orthodox Church in 1922-23 (see section
5.9(e)), the regime became more tolerant towards religious groups. Many priests
were sympathetic towards communist ideals which, after all, do have some sim
ilarities to Christian attitudes to the poor and oppressed. Some writers have even
referred to Jesus Christ as the first communist on account of his, for the time,
revolutionary teachings. Some priests formed a breakaway group called the Living
Church, deposed the Patriarch Tikhon (the head of the Orthodox Church) and
took over the leadership themselves. Any bishops and priests who continued to
oppose the communists were sacked. Eventually Tikhon himself publicly
renounced his opposition to the regime and became leader again. When he died
in 1925 it was revealed in his will that he advised all Christians to support the
government. There seemed a good chance of complete reconciliation between
church and state, and with careful handling, the church could have been a useful
tool in the state's campaign to bring the peasants under control. However, many
militant young communists continued to believe that the church was a ’harmful
superstition’ which must be eliminated. In 1925 they formed the League of the
Militant Godless and launched an anti-religious propaganda campaign with
lectures, pamphlets and journals, mainly directed at the peasants. \
With Stalin in the ascendant, tolerance was not destined to last long. Many
priests opposed collectivization and so relations between church and state
deteriorated again. Stalin never publicly announced the start of an anti-religion
campaign, but secret instructions were sent to local party organizations encour
aging physical attacks on churches and priests. Membership of the Godless
League rose to a peak of five million, and they responded with enthusiasm.
Hundreds of churches and cemeteries were vandalized and literally thousands of
priests were killed. The number of working priests fell from about 60,000 in 1925
to under 6000 by 1941. Not all of them were murdered - many country priests
fled to the towns and tried to avoid the secret police and make a living incognito.
The slaughter was not confined to Christians: hundreds of Muslim and Jewish
leaders - mullahs and rabbis - also fell victim. The campaign was relentless: by
1941 only one in 40 church buildings was still functioning as a church. In the new
cities like Magnitogorsk no churches were allowed to be built, and in Moscow the
Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was blown up to make way for the Palace of Soviets
(which was never built). The campaign against religion caused outrage, especially
in rural areas where priests, mullahs and rabbis were popular and respected
members of the local communities. Most peasants looked on them almost as
i '
\
part of the family; a village community which had lost its church, mosque or syna
gogue and its spiritual leader felt bereft and lacking a sense of direction. And
what was the point of it all? Apparently the League of the Militant Godless
believed that communities in such a state of shock would submit to collectivization
more readily; the disappearance of so many priests removed the most likely focuses
of opposition to collectivization and other unpopular government policies.
During the Second World War the regime and the church were to some extent
reconciled. In 1942, with the war going badly for the Russians, and both Lenin
grad and Moscow under threat from the Germans, Stalin decided that the church
had a role to play after all, as a force for patriotism. An understanding was
reached with Christians, Muslims and Jews that past differences would be forgotten
in their joint struggle against the invader. Churches, mosques and synagogues
were allowed to open again, and priests, mullahs and rabbis were released from
jail. By most accounts it seems that the various religious groups played a vital
role in maintaining morale among the general public.
(f) Literature and the theatre

It was during the years 1928 to 1931, the period known as the Cultural Revolution^
that the regime began to systematically mobilize writers, artists and musicians to
wage a cultural war against ‘bourgeois intellectuals'.87 There were two rival
groups of writers; the convinced communists were members of the All-Russian
Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and they were committed to ‘socialist
realism’ and what they called ‘working-class values’. Some of the young hotheads
among them got carried away and began to suggest that the time was approaching
for the state to wither away. Bukharin described them as suffering from ‘revolu
tionary avant-gardism’. Stalin was happy to give RAPP free rein for the time being
because it enabled him to claim that his ‘revolution from above’ was a response
to the surge of militancy from below. The other group of writers were the
non-communists who wanted to keep politics out of literature and were labelled
dismissively by the communists as ‘fellow-travellers’. They were members of the
All-Russian Union of Writers (AUW), and they included most of the leading
writers who had made their names before the revolution. RAPP did not approve
of the attitude of the AUW and in 1929 began a campaign against it, accusing
some of its members of publishing anti-Soviet works abroad. They were found
guilty and the government dissolved the AUW, replacing it with a new organ
ization called the All-Russian Union of Soviet Writers (AUSW). About half the for
mer AUW members were refused admission to the new union; this was a serious
blow for them, since only union members were allowed to publish. Their choice
was simple - they either had to recant and beg to be readmitted, or cease having
their works published in the USSR.
RAPP was now very much the dominant literary organization, but from Stalin’s
point of view it had one unfortunate fault: it believed in portraying society as it
really was, whereas Stalin wanted it portraying as he would like it be. But RAPP
members felt that if there were failings in the system, these must be exposed; if
this meant criticizing the party, then so be it. However, in 1930 Stalin announced
that nothing should be published which showed the party in a poor light or

which went against the party line. Many RAPP members were slow to respond to
this clear warning; therefore in April 1932 the regime disbanded both RAPP and
the new AUSW and replaced it by one organization - the Union of Soviet Writers;
each branch of the arts was given the same treatment - one union for all
members. Maxim Gorky (whose works Stalin admired) became chairman of the
Writers’ Union, and Andrei Zhdanov emerged as the politician most involved in
the arts. In August 1934 he opened the First Congress of Soviet Writers. He
repeated Stalin’s earlier pronouncement that the guiding principle of Soviet
literature must be ‘socialist realism’, whose main goal was ‘the ideological
remoulding and re-education of the toiling people in the spirit of socialism
... Our literature must not shun romanticism, but it must be a romanticism of
a new type, revolutionary romanticism.’
Among the most popular new works were Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the
Steel was Tempered which came out in 1934, and Mikhail Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil
Upturned which dealt with collectivization; the first part of this appeared in 1931,
though the general opinion seemed to be that it was not up to the standard of his
real masterpiece, Quiet Flows the Don, the first part of which had appeared in
1929. There were other works of lesser quality sometimes known as five-year
plan novels, in which the heroes were ordinary people who bravely achieved
their targets in spite of all kinds of obstacles. There was the bus driver who
reduced petrol consumption by careful driving; the engine driver who repeatedly
overcame all the efforts of wreckers and brought his train in on time; and the
engineer who successfully completed a new dam despite bad weather, landslides
and the evil machinations of foreign spies and saboteurs. These were not great
literature, but arguably they served a purpose - they were easily understood by
ordinary workers and peasants, they raised morale and they inspired people to
greater efforts.
Writers who did not succeed in producing the right kind of ‘socialist realism’
ran the risk of arrest. Stalin himself sometimes read the novels in typescript and
would add comments and suggested changes which the authors were expected
to take note of. He insisted on extensive changes being made in later editions of
Sholokhov’s novel Quiet Flows the Don because he thought some passages
implied criticism of the Red Army. In the later 1930s many writers, whose work
was considered to be beyond redemption, were denounced as Trotskyites or
wreckers and were arrested; some were kept in jail or labour camp for long
periods and others were executed. Among the best-known victims were the poet
Osip Mandelstam who had written a poem critical of Stalin in 1933 (Document J);
he tried to make amends later by writing an ode in praise of Stalin, but he was
eventually arrested and died in a labour camp. Evgenia Ginsburg spent 18 years
in prison and labour camps for having allegedly organized a writers’ terrorist
group (Document E). Isaac Babel, a well-known writer of short stories and author
of Red Cavalry, died in a labour camp, and the writer Boris Pilniak was arrested in
1937 and shot. Some of the best writers, like the poetess Anna Akhmatova and
the novelist Boris Pasternak, felt unable to adjust to the demands of ‘socialist
realism’, and either stopped work altogether or kept their new work locked away.
Pasternak’s great novel Dr Zhivago was published abroad after Stalin's death.
Mikhail Bulgakov’s wonderful novel The Master and Margarita lay unpublished
I V

for years until after Stalin’s death. Soon after Khrushchev came to power in 1956
the authorities admitted that at least 600 writers had perished in prison and
labour camps during Stalin’s rule. Theatre people also came under attack:
a number of actors, actresses and ballet dancers were sent to labour camps.
Natalia Sats, founder of the Moscow Children's Theatre, was arrested and sent to
a labour camp in 1937 and survived for seven years until she was eventually
released. The most celebrated victim in the theatre was the great experimental
director Vsevelod Meyerhold. He had gradually fallen out of favour because his
productions were thought to be too avant-garde. In 1938 his theatre in Moscow
was closed down on the grounds that it was ‘alien to Soviet art.’ In June 1939 he
was summoned to appear before a meeting of producers chaired by the notori
ous prosecutor Vyshinsky in order to defend himself. Apparently he made a good
show of self-criticism but could not resist a final swipe at the regime: ‘the theatre
of socialist realism has nothing in common with art... Where once there were
the best theatres in the world, now everything is gloomily well-regulated, stu
pefying and murderous in its lack of talent. Is that your aim? If it is, you have
done something monstrous! In hunting down formalism, you have eliminated
a r t’88A few days later Meyerhold was arrested and tortured in prison. His wife,
a famous actress, was found brutally stabbed to death in their flat, but the police
carried out no investigation of the crime. This was taken by all writers and artists
as a warning to wives of potential ‘enemies of the people'. Meyerhold himself
was shot in February 1940.
Ironically in view of all this obsession with ‘socialist realism’, after the first flush
of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1930s, the regime decided to reinstate
nineteenth century classical Russian literature into the body of acceptable read
ing. The works of the poet Pushkin, the novels of Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol and
Ivan Turgenev and the plays of Anton Chekhov were back in fashion again, since
the government had now decided that, after all, these writers were ‘revolutionary
democrats’. However, Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of the great novels Crime and
Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, was still frowned on as being too
conservative.
(g) Art, architecture and music

After the experimentation in art in the 1920s, once ‘socialist realism’ took hold,
painters and sculptors had to fall into line. Abstract art was rejected and paint
ings were expected either to portray workers straining every muscle to fulfil their
targets and other ‘events' in the economy, or to show scenes from the revolution
or Civil War, and revolutionary leaders in portraits or other settings. They were to
be photographic in style and finely detailed. There was a steady flow of paintings
of Lenin and Stalin in various revolutionary and heroic poses - a striking one
entitled Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, and innumerable others with titles
like The Steelworker and The Milkmaids. The French novelist Andre Gide visited
the USSR in 1937 and afterwards wrote: ‘At Tiflis I saw an exhibition of modem
art of which it would be charitable not to speak... episodes of Stalin’s life being
used as the themes of these illustrations... In the USSR, however fine a work
may be, if it is not in line, it scandalizes. Beauty is considered a bourgeois value.

What is demanded of the artist is that he shall conform/89 Busts of Lenin and
Stalin wefe about the only items that sculptors were permitted to produce. As for
architecture, it too deteriorated into the uninspiring and dull, with grandiose
neo-classical facades and featureless tower blocks being popular.
Music followed a similar pattern to literature; in the Cultural Revolution years
(1928-31) the more aggressive, committed communist members of the Russian
Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) condemned what they described as
the 'modernism' of contemporary Western music. This included not only the
atonal 12-note music of the Austrians Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, but also
jazz, music hall style 'light' music and even the fox-trot. However, in the mid-1930s
the regime relaxed its attitude towards non-classical music, and jazz, dance and
‘light’ music were permitted; after all, Stalin had just told people 'life has become
more joyful, comrades.’ There were two outstanding classical composers who
had gained international reputations by the 1930s - Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri
Shostakovich. Prokofiev had left Russia soon after the revolution but decided to
return in 1933. He was particularly successful at producing music of a high
quality which could be readily appreciated by ordinary people - his film score for
Lieutenant Kije (1934), his ballet Romeo and Juliet (1936) and his musical story
for children, Peter and the Wolf, were highly popular with audiences and the
authorities. Shostakovich90was not quite so successful; his first opera, The Nose,
based on a short story by Gogol and first performed in 1930, was condemned by
RAPM and banned. His second opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, was well
received by audiences and critics in 1934 and it ran for over 80 performances in
Leningrad and over 90 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Unfortunately in
January 1936 Stalin himself decided to go to a performance at the Bolshöi and
took Molotov along with him. They did not like what they heard and walked out
before the end. Two days later a devastating article, thought to have been written
by Stalin himself, appeared in Pravda; the opera was dismissed as ‘a cacophony,
primitive, crude and vulgar - the music shouts, quacks, explodes, pants and
sighs, so as to convey the love scenes in the most naturalistic manner.’ It was
too much influenced by Western formalism and experimentation and negative
to the nth degree, according to the writer of the article. Within a few days all
Shostakovich’s work had been banned, and he himself decided to withdraw his
Fourth Symphony which was just about to go into rehearsal. Lady Macbeth was
not performed again until 1962, long after Stalin’s death, and Shostakovich had
been so shaken by the whole episode that he never composed another opera.
After the appearance of the Pravda article he expected to be arrested and kept
a bag packed so that he would be ready when the dreaded knock at the door
came in the early hours of the morning. However, for some reason, possibly
because Alexei Tolstoy, one of Stalin’s favourite authors, defended him to Stalin,
Shostakovich was spared, although he remained in official disgrace for over a year.
The Lady Macbeth incident was enough to frighten Soviet composers into
writing music which was melodic, approachable, stirring and inspiring, like the
music of the great Russian composers of the nineteenth century - Tchaikovsky,
Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin. With his Fifth Symphony (1937) Shostakovich
succeeded in producing a great piece of music which also fulfilled the require
ments of the regime. He was gradually rehabilitated: he was allowed to teach at
I V
the Leningrad conservatoire, in 1940 he was awarded the Stalin prize for his
Piano Quintet, and during the Second World War he became something of
a hero, staying on in Leningrad during the German siege and working on his
Seventh Symphony which was eventually performed in 1943 and became known
as the Leningrad Symphony.
(h) The cinema

Like Lenin, Stalin considered that film was probably the most important form of
communication; he loved films and had a private cinema in the Kremlin and in
his dacha. As the Cultural Revolution got under way in 1928, the party conference
demanded that film-makers should play their part and make films which were
‘intelligible to the millions;' the avant-garde and experimental films of the 1920s
were to be abandoned in favour of films which told a simple but powerful story.
In 1930 Boris Shumyatsky was given the job of modernizing the film industry. He
aimed to develop the mass production of films that were genuinely entertaining
as well as being full of ‘socialist realism', and he wanted to extend the network
of cinemas to the most remote parts of the USSR. He was hampered by an
unexpected development - the arrival of sound films, which were more expens
ive to make and which created language problems in a country where so many
different languages were spoken. Another difficulty was the almost impossible
demands of the regime which wanted film-makers to incorporate sometimes
contradictory themes into their work - proletarian values, classless Soviet nation
alism, the problems experienced by ordinary people in the drive towards a socialist
state, the heroic exploits of the revolutionaries, and the glorious communist
future as it would be. Film-makers were aware of what happened to writers and
theatre directors whose work did not win the approval of the authorities, and
many of them were reluctant to risk a similar fate. The output of new films
declined rapidly in the early 1930s. Shumyatsky decided to go and see how the
real experts did things, and in 1935 he took a small group of Russian film-makers
to Hollywood to look for new ideas. He soon became convinced that the Russian
film industry needed a Soviet equivalent of Hollywood, and he chose the Crimea
as the site for his project because the agreeable climate would allow filming all
year round. Unfortunately, the government refused to provide the necessary
finance and the project never got off the ground. Stalin was not satisfied with
Shumyatsky's progress, and in 1938 he was arrested and shot.
Nevertheless, in spite of all the obstacles, over 300 Soviet films came out
between 1933 and 1940, some of which were of high quality. There was a huge
increase in the number of cinemas in the same period - from about 7000 to
nearly 30,000. Good examples of socialist realism in film were Road to Life (1931)
about a group of homeless boys who are redeemed by a wise educator who wins
their respect and turns them into excellent Soviet citizens; Counterplan (1932),
probably the best of the films about industrialization, and boasting a score by
Shostakovich; and, most famous of all, Chapayev (1934), a film by the brothers
Sergei and Giorgii Vasiliev, a powerful and romantic story about a Civil War hero,
which was extremely popular with audiences. Most popular of all were the Holly-
wood-style musical comedies by Grigori Alexandrov, who had started his film
StaJin in control 255

career as Eisenstein’s assistant. The three best ones were The Happy Guys (1934),
which broke all box-office records, The Circus (1936) and Volga-Volga (1938).
These films tried to put over the message that life in the USSR was happier and
better in every way than anywhere else in the world. Stalin became so obsessed
with making sure that the film-makers were presenting an acceptable picture of
life in Soviet Russia that he vetted a large number of scripts himself. ‘It is a telling
comment on his state of mind’, points out Richard Taylor, ‘that the editors of the
unpublished fourteenth volume of his Works could find nothing to include for
the year 1940, when the rest of Europe was engulfed in war, but Stalin's
comments on some film scripts.'91 Some that did not find favour were by Sergei
Eisenstein who failed to repeat his great masterpieces of the 1920s - Strike, The
Battleship Potemkin and October. He was forced to abandon his work on the film
Bezhin Meadow (1935) which dealt with collectivization and told the true story of
a boy who denounced his father to the authorities as a kulak, and was then
murdered by his relatives. The party wanted the boy to be portrayed as a hero on
whom young people should model themselves. The censors decided that
Eisenstein had somehow not struck the right note and insisted that the film
should be withdrawn. He salvaged his reputation in 1938 with his great patriotic
film Alexander Nevsky. It had a magnificent score by Prokofiev and told the story
of the invasion of Russia by Teutonic knights in medieval times. In a spectacular
final scene the great Russian hero, Prince Alexander, defeats the Germans as they
flee across the ice on a frozen river. It was a clear warning about what the
Germans could expect if they dared to invade Russia again, but perhaps Hitler
did not see the film.
(i) The nationalities

As we saw earlier (section 5.8(d)) the government encouraged the awareness of
national cultures, allowed local languages and promoted non-Russians into
important positions. The Communists hoped that liberal treatment oYthe non-
Russians would attract Ukrainians, Armenians, Belorussians and Moldovans
who lived outside the USSR to join; there were, for example, Ukrainians and
Belorussians living in what was now Poland, and there Were Moldovans in
Rumania. Ukraine was the republic most conscious of its national culture, and
by 1936 over 80 per cent of school-age children were being taught in Ukrainian.
The government even went so far as to employ scholars to invent written
languages for smaller ethnic groups who had never had one. Although the gov
ernments of the republics did not have a great deal of control over their internal
affairs, ordinary citizens had some reason to feel grateful to Moscow, at least
until Stalin began his agrarian reforms.
The tolerant attitude towards the nationalities ended suddenly in December
1932 because of widespread resistance to Stalin’s collectivization policy. In
Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the Northern Caucasus there was much
fiercer resistance than in Russia itself, and it was reported to Stalin that resist
ance was being fuelled by local nationalism. In Ukraine the situation was exacer
bated by the famine and the Ukrainian Communist Party infuriated Moscow by
admitting that collectivization had been a failure in their republic. Stalin
254 Mastering T w en tieth -C e n tu ry Russian H istory

decided that the Ukrainian party leadership needed ‘strengthening'; a team of
top officials and thousands of trusted party workers descended on Ukraine to
carry out a purge of ‘bourgeois nationalist deviationists’. This was done with
utter ruthlessness - many thousands of people were deported from their
villages, and many were sent to prisons or labour camps. This was followed by
similar purges in Belorussia, Transcaucasia and Central Asia, after which the
regime abolished most of the nationality districts and Soviets that it had recently
created to represent non-Russian minorities within the different republics. Non-
Russian nationalities were not suppressed, but within each republic only the
nationality of the republic was recognized as official. So, for example, Ukrainians
living in the Northern Caucasus had their schools closed down; and Belorus
sians living on (for them) the wrong side of the border with the Russian republic
were no longer officially recognized as a Belorussian minority. This meant a sharp
reduction in the number of ethnic groups from 188 in the 1926 census to 107 in
the 1937 census.
The government began to promote pro-Russian patriotism; in 1938 Russian
was made compulsory in all schools in the USSR, and although non-Russian lan
guages continued to be taught, non-Russians could choose to be taught in Russian.
Everyone had the right to choose their own nationality and an increasing number
of non-Russians chose to become assimilated with the Russians. Yet at the same
time the new 1936 constitution increased the number of republics: Transcaucasia
was split up so that Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia became full union republics
within the USSR; Kazakhstan and Kirgizstan (which were previously autonomous
republics) were elevated to füll union republics; and the five autonomous regions
became autonomous republics (see section 6.5(e)). In 1939-40 five more full
republics were added to the USSR - Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Moldavia and
Karelo-Finland (see section 7.1(d)). The constitution mentioned the nurturing of
national cultures provided they were ‘socialist in content'. The republics were
encouraged to hold official celebrations of their important historical events and
their writers, artists and musicians, though at the same time they were left in no
doubt that Russian culture was in prime position. It was a strangely ambivalent
policy in more than one sense: in spite of Stalin's ‘socialism in one country’, the
communists were still arguably an internationalist party, and yet they were genu
inely anxious to preserve the non-Russian nationalities, and encourage national
identity and have them all living happily together in one big family. Russian
historian Yuri Slezkine describes the USSR as a ‘communal apartment’ in which
each national family had its own room.92 But the encouragement was only up to
a point: so long as it did not conflict with the continuation of a unitary, socialist
state. Stalin himself said, in a famous phrase, that he wanted cultures to be
‘national in form, socialist in content’. At the first sign of any opposition to Moscow
or any national political aspirations, there was an immediate clamp-down. In
Georgia the secret police leader, Lavrenti Beria, dealt ruthlessly with any potential
nationalist threat and also with any peasant resistance.
The relationship between Moscow and the non-Russian republics was almost
imperial/colonial; the Moscow government took over more and more of the
republics’powers - in areas such as agriculture, taxation, higher education, media,
justice and public health. After the nationalist/communist leaders had been

purged, all the really important decisions were taken in Moscow. Kazakhstan was
forced to pndertake collectivization and meet agricultural quotas, a policy totally
inappropriate in that region where the population were mainly nomads who knew
nothing about growing wheat. It is calculated that between 1.3 and 1.8 million
Kazakhs died during this ill-fated campaign. Similarly in Ukraine so many people
perished that nationalist leaders began to feel that Stalin was hell-bent on
exterminating the entire Ukrainian nation. And yet on the other hand in 1939 the
Ukrainians were allowed to hold lavish celebrations of the 125th anniversary of
the birth of the Ukrainian writer and poet Taras Shevchenko. By 1940 therefore
the regime’s policy towards the nationalities had produced a paradoxical situ
ation: at the same time as its main drive was towards modernization, it found
itself encouraging a revival of traditional cultures which in some areas had been
dying out. As Terry Martin puts it* ‘Communism’s folkloric national identities were
the invention of the state, usually with the enthusiastic participation of national
elites... Modernization is the theory of Soviet intentions; neo-traditionalism, the
theory of their unintended consequences.’93
Documents
(A) Trotsky explains why he thought Stalin would become the dictator of the
USSR.
In the spring of 1924, after one of the Plenums of the Central Committee at
which I was not present because of illness, I said to Smirnov: ‘Stalin will
become the dictator of the USSR.’ Smirnov knew Stalin well. They had shared
revolutionary work and exile together for years, and under such conditions
people get to know each other best of all.
‘Stalin?’ he asked me with amazement. ‘But he is a mediocrity, a colourless
nonentity.’
‘Mediocrity, yes; nonentity, no,’ I answered him. ‘The dialectics of history
have already hooked him and will raise him up. He is needed by all of them -
by the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the nepmen, the kulaks, the
upstarts, the sneaks, by all the worms that are crawling out of the upturned
soil of the manured revolution. He knows how to meet them on their own
ground, he speaks their language and he knows how to lead them. He has the
deserved reputation of an old revolutionist, which makes him invaluable to
them as a blinder on the eyes of the country. He has will and daring. He will
not hesitate to use them and to move them against the Party. He has already
started doing this. Right now he is organizing around himself the sneaks of the
Party, the artful dodgers... ’
Source: quoted in F.W. Stacey, Stalin and the Making of Modern Russia, p. 9.
(B) Alexander Barmine, a party membqt and worker, remembers Trotsky’s short
comings (memoirs published in 1945).
*
i '
258 Mastering Twentieth-Century Ityssian History
As soon as he [Trotsky] had finished he left the hall. There was no personal
contact in the corridors. This aloofness, I believe, may partly explain Trotsky's
inability as well as his unwillingness to build a large personal following among
the rank and file of the Party. Against the intrigues of Party leaders, which
were soon to multiply, Trotsky fought only with the weapons he knew how to
use: his pen and his oratory. And even these weapons he took up only when it
was too late.
Source: Alexander Barmine, One Who Survived, pp. 93-4.
(C) Stalin’s speech to local party and soviet workers in Siberia in January 1928,
usually taken to mark the beginning of collectivization.
'You're working badly! You’re idle and you indulge the kulaks. Take care that
there aren’t some kulak agents among you. We won’t tolerate this sort of
outrage for long.. . Take a look at the kulak farms; you’ll see their granaries
and bams are full of grain; they have to cover the grain with awnings because
there’s no more room for it inside. The kulak farms have got something like
a thousand tons of surplus grain per farm. 1propose that:
(a) you demand that the kulaks hand over their surpluses at once at state
prices;
(b) if they refuse to submit to the law, you should charge them under Article
107 of the RSFRS Criminal Code and confiscate their grain for the state,
25 per cent of it to be redistributed among the poor and less well-off
middle peasants.
Source: quoted in Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin, pp. 164-5.
(D) John Scott, an American engineer who went to work in the USSR, describes
his experiences during the 1930s.
One of the most important projects was the creation of a heavy industry
base in the Urals and Siberia out of reach of any invader, and capable of
supplying the country with arms and machines in immense quantities...
It was necessary to start from scratch. There were no supply bases, no rail
roads, no other mills in or near Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk. But Stalin and
his Political Bureau decided that the job must be done. Stalin was probably
one of the few men in the Soviet Union who realized how catastrophically
expensive it was going to be. But he was convinced that it was just a matter
of time until the Soviet Union would again be invaded by hostile capitalist
powers seeking to destroy the first Socialist State. Stalin considered it his
sacred obligation to see to it that when the time came the attackers would
not be able to accomplish i t ... As the Arctic winter suddenly broke into
{continued)

spring» Magnitogorsk changed beyond recognition. In early April everything
was still»frozen solid. By May the ground had thawed and the city was swim
ming in m ud... Welding became next to impossible as our ragged cables
short-circuited at every step. Bubonic plague had broken out in three places
not far from Magnitogorsk.. '. The resistance of the population was very low
because of undernourishment during the winter and consistent overwork.
Sanitary conditions, particularly during the thaw, were appalling. Within two
weeks the sun had dried the earth and the summer was upon us. By the
middle of May the heat was intolerable. In the barracks we were consumed by
bed-bugs and other vermin, and at work we had trouble keeping to the job.
The history of actual construction of Magnitogorsk was fascinating...
Brigades of young enthusiasts from every comer of the Soviet Union arrived in
the summer of 1930 and did the groundwork of railroad and dam construction
necessary before work could begin on the plant itself. Later groups of local
peasants and herdsmen came because of bad conditions in the villages, due to
collectivization. A colony of several hundred foreign engineers and specialists
arrived to advise and direct the work. Money was spent by the millions...
From 1928 until 1932 nearly a quarter of a million people came to Magni
togorsk. About three quarters of these new arrivals came of their own free will
seeking work, bread-cards, better conditions. The rest came under compulsion.
Source: John Scott, Behind the Urals, pp. 52-4,61,110.
(E) Evgenia Ginzburg, a writer who survived 18 years in prisons and labour
camps, describes her interrogation.
I was put on the ‘conveyer belt'. The interrogators worked in shifts; I didn't.
Seven days without sleep or food. Without even returning to my cell. The
object of the ‘conveyer' is to wear out the nerves, weaken the boây, break
resistance, and force the prisoner to sign whatever is required. The first day or
two I still noticed the individual characteristics of the interrogators - Livanov,
calm and bureaucratic, urging me to sign some monstrous piece of rubbish as
though it were no more than perfectly normal, routine detail; Tsarevsky and
Vevers always shouting and threatening - Vevers in addition sniffing cocaine
and giggling as well as shouting. ‘Ha, ha, ha! What’s become of our high-brow
beauty now! You look at least forty... and if you go on digging your heels in,
we’ll turn you into a real granny. You haven't been in the rubber cell yet, have
you? You haven't? Well, there’s a pleasure in store.'
Major Elshin was invariably courteous and humane. He asked me why T was
so becomingly pale’ and was ‘amazed’ to hear that I had been questioned
without food or sleep for four or five days on end. ‘Is it really worth torturing
yourself like that rather than sign a purely formal, unimportant record? Come
on now, get it over with and go to sleep.' The ‘unimportant record’ stated that,
on Elvov’s instruction I had organized a Tartar writers’ branch of a terrorist
group of which I was a member: there followed a list of Tartar writers I had
‘recruited’... I have no idea what answers I gave the colonel. I think I was
t V
silent most of the time, only repeating occasionally: ‘I won’t sign.’ He used
threats and persuasion in turn, promising that I would see my husband, my
children. Finally I blacked out.
Source: Evgenia Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, pp. 71-2.
(F) A British diplomat, Fitzroy Maclean, describes the opening of the show-trial
of Bukharin and Rykov in March 1938.
For sheer blood and thunder the indictment left nothing to be desired. The
prisoners were charged, collectively and individually, with every conceivable
crime: high treason, murder, attempted murder, espionage and all kinds of
sabotage. With diabolical ingenuity they had plotted to wreck industry and
agriculture; to assassinate Stalin and the other Soviet leaders; to overthrow
the Soviet regime with the help of foreign powers; to seize power themselves
and restore capitalism... One after another, using the same words, they
admitted their guilt: Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda... Bit by bit, as one confession
succeeded another, the fantastic structure took shape. Each prisoner incrimi
nated his fellows and was in turn incriminated by them. Readily, glibly, they
dwelt on their crimes and on those of their companions, enlarged on them,
embroidered them ... And yet what they said, the actual contents of their
statements, seemed to bear no relation to reality. The fabric that was being
built up was fantastic beyond belief... As the trial progressed, it became ever
clearer that the underlying purpose of every testimony was to blacken the
leaders of the ‘bloc’, to represent them, not as political offenders, but as com
mon criminals, murderers, poisoners and spies.
Source: quoted in F.W. Stacey, Stalin and the Making of Modern Russia, pp. 31-3.
(G) The closing speech by the Public Prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, at the trial of
Bukharin and Rykov, March 1938.
The whole country, from the youngest to the oldest, are waiting for and
demanding one thing: that the traitors and spies who sold out our motherland
to the enemy be shot like vile dogs! The people demand one thing: that the
accursed vermin be squashed! Time will pass. The hated traitors' graves will
become overgrown with weeds and thistles, covered with the eternal contempt
of honest Soviet people, of the entire Soviet people.
While over our happy land, bright and clear as ever, our sun will shine its
rays. We, our people, will as before stride along our path now cleansed of the
last trace of the scum and vileness of the past, led by our beloved leader and
teacher, the great Stalin.
Source: quoted in Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 293.

(H) Letter from A.M. Volkova, a worker on a sovkhoz (state collective farm) in the
Ivanovo district, in reply to a questionnaire sent out by the Department of
Cattle and Dairy Sovkhozes in September 1935.
You wrote about an apartment. Our apartment is 3 metres wide and 5 metres
long. We have lived for two years without windows, in winter wearing coats.
I have two children, both in school, one in the fourth grade, the other in the
second. They have no shoes or coat and go barefoot and only in a shirt. You
wrote about the cafeteria. We don't go to the cafeteria. I earn 108 to 116 and
no more. You wrote about health. My health is very bad and all this depends
on food, and you wrote about vouchers to the health resort, but with whom
can I leave the children? I am completely illiterate. I am 48 years old and it is
late to learn. You wrote about animals. We don’t have any. We were given
a pig but it was undernourished and diseased. I have been forgotten in this
respect. Nowhere is there a work comer where my children can write or read.
There are no tools or materials for a labour comer. They don’t give milk to
schoolchildren who must go with crusts of bread. We live badly. Give help.
[The letter is signed Volkov, V.K. - probably the older of the two children]
Source: quoted in Lewis H. Siegelbaum, ‘Dear Comrade, You Ask What We Need*, in Sheila
Fitzpatrick (editor), Stalinism: New Directions, p. 239.
(I) Victor Serge writes about the hardships of the winter of 1934-35. He had
already spent some time in prison for being an associate of Trotsky* and
although he had been released, he was expecting to be arrested again. How
ever, he was eventually allowed to leave the USSR.
The winter of 1934-5 was frightful, despite the lessening of thè-famine

towards the New Year and the abolition of bread-rationing. For a long while
my wife, a victim to crises of insanity, had been away from me for treatment in
Leningrad, and I was alone with my son... We rationed ourselves to the limit,
so that all we fed on now was a little black bread and ‘egg-soup’ which I made
to last two days with some sorrel and just one egg. Fortunately we did have
wood. Soon I began to suffer from boils... An enormous anthrax tumour
under my left breast laid me flat on my back... This was a little after Kirov’s
assassination. I left for the hospital lying in straw on a low sledge. My son
walked along beside the sledge.
The hospital was run as efficiently as the general destitution permitted;
what it treated primarily was poverty... chronic undernourishment aggra
vated by alcoholism. The worker who lived on sour-cabbage soup, without fat
content, would acquire an abscess as a result of a simple bruise. Children were
covered in cold sores; whole wards were full of peasants with frozen limbs;
bellies empty, clothes worn and threadbare, they offered small resistance to
the cold. I saw gangrenous flesh being tom from the frozen limbs with pin
cers; indescribable scars resulted.
»'
Nor shall I forget how on the most wretched of our days of misery we all
heard a radio broadcast from a regional meeting of kolkhoz workers. Passion
ate voices went on endlessly thanking the Leader for ‘the good life we lead'.
And twenty or so patients tormented by hunger, half of them kolkhoz workers
themselves, listened to all in silence.
Source: Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp. 310-13.
(J) Poem by Osip Mandelstam attacking Stalin in 1933. It led to his eventual arrest
and death in a labour camp.
We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
But where there’s so much as half a conversation
The Kremlin’s mountaineer will get his mention.
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders -
Fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.
Source: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, p. 13.
Notes
1. Roy A. Medvedev, ‘New Pages from the Political Biography of Stalin’, in Robert C. Tucker
(editor), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, p. 204.
2. Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, pp. 465,469.
3. Adam B. Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, p. 757.
4. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed- Trotsky: 1921-1929, pp. 136-7.
5. Martin McCauley, Stalin and Stalinism, p. 15.
6. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, p. 109.
7. Ibid., p. 87.
8. For a full account of this process see Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of
Stalin.
9. Volkogonov, p. 163.
10. See J. Hughes, Stalin, Siberia and the Crisis o f the New Economic Policy.
11. Robert Service, ‘Joseph Stalin: The Making of a Stalinist', in John Channon (editor),
Politics, Society and Stalinism in the USSR, p. 25.

13. Alec Nove, An Economic History o f the USSR 1917-1991, p. 149.
14. Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System, p. 94.
15. Sheila ^Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, pp. 218-19.
16. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 319,322.
17. Alexander Gershenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book o f
Essays, pp. 144-60.
18. Lewin, pp. 114-20.
19. James R. Millar, ‘Mass Collectivization and the Contribution of Soviet agriculture to the
First Five-Year Plan: A Review Article’, Slavic Review, December 1974, pp. 764-6.
20. Nove, p. 159.
21. Ibid., p.165.
22. Ibid., p. 171.
24. Quoted in Robert C. Tucker, ‘Stalinism as Revolution from Above', in Tucker (editor),
Stalinism:Essays in Historical Interpretation, p. 83.
25. Quoted in R.W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive 1929-30, p. 148.
26. Lynne Viola, The Best Sons ofthe Fatherland. Workers in the Vanguard o f Soviet Collectiv
ization.
27. Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul. The diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931-9’,
in Sheila Fitzpatrick (editor), Stalinism: New Directions, pp. 89-90.
28. All the statistics in this section are from Nove, pp. 180,186.
29. Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia, p. 183.
30. R.W. Davies, Mark Harrison and S.G. Wheatcroft (editors), The Economic Transformation
o f the Soviet Union, 1913-1945, pp. 113-14.
31. Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences o f Stalinism,
p. 241.
32. Quoted in Suny, p. 227.
33. Hellbeck, p. 102.
34. Robert Conquest, Harvest o f Sorrow.
35. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘The Great Departure. Rural-Urban Migration in the Soviet-Union,
1929-33’, in W.R. Rosenberg and L.S. Siegelbaum (editors), Social Dimensions o f Soviet
Industrialization, pp. 21-2. See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants. Resistance and
Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization.
36. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 322.
37. Ibid., p. 328.
38. Nove, p. 193. N-
39. Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932,
chapter 5.
40. Donald Filtzer, ‘Stalinism and the Working Class in the 1930s’, in Jphn Channon (editor),
Politics, Society and Stalinism in the USSR, pp. 166-7.
41. Suny, p. 240.
42. Nove, p. 195. For more about the First Five-Year Plan see Nove, pp. 189-225.
43. Filtzer, p. 180.
44. John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City o f Steel, p. 110;
45. Filtzer, pp. 166-78; see also his Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization. The for
mation o f modem Soviet production relations, 1928-41 (New York, 1986).
46. Lewin, p. 220.
48. Nove, p. 240.
49. Medvedev, p. 248.
51. Nove, pp. 224-5.
52. Medvedev, p. 254.
53. James R. Harris, ‘Purging Local Cliques in the Urals Region’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (editor),
Stalinism: New Directions, pp. 262-80. Se$ also his The Great Urals: Regionalism and the
Evolution ofthe Soviet System (Ithaca, NY, 1999), chapter 6.
**
264 Mastering Twentieth-Century Ressian History
55. Holland Hunter, ‘The Overambitious First Soviet Five-Year Plan', Slavic Review, 32: 2
(1973), pp. 237-57. See also H. Hunter and J.M. Szyrmer, Faulty Foundations. Soviet
Economic Policies, 1928-1940.
56. Davies, Harrison and Wheatcroft, p. 157.
58. Medvedev, pp. 330-4.
59. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, pp. 67-9.
60. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge.
61. J. Arch Getty, The Road To Terror: Stalinism and the Self-Destruction o f the Bolsheviks,
1932- 9.
62. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, pp. 166-70.
63. Volkogonov, pp. 225,308.
64. Quoted in Ronald G. Suny, The Soviet Experiment, p. 267.
65. Conquest, p. 37. For a full account of Kirov's murder see Robert Conquest, Stalin and the
Kirov Murder (New York, 1989).
66. Ibid., p. 74.
67. Volkogonov, pp. 280-1.
68. Medvedev, pp. 399-403.
69. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 376.
70. For a füll account of the Tukhachevsky affair, see Conquest, The Great Terror, pp. 182-225;
Volkogonov, pp. 316-29.
71. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, pp. 126-7.
72. Paul M. Hagenloh, ‘ “Socially Harmful Elements" and the Great Terror’, in Sheila
Fitzpatrick (editor), Stalinism: New Directions, pp. 286-7.
73. Quoted in H. Montgomery Hyde, Stalin: The History o f a Dictator, p. 377.
74. Conquest, pp. 485-9; Jerry Hough, How the Soviet Union is Governed, p. 176; Suny,
p. 266; Davies, Harrison and Wheatcroft (editors), pp. 67-77 for a detailed examination of
the statistics.
75. Service, pp. 225-6.
76. T.H. Rigby, Political Elites in the USSR, p. 132.
77. JA. Getty, Origins o f the Great Purges. The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered,
1933- 1938, pp. 16-17,27, 56,91, 153,196-206. Gabor T. Ritterspoom, Stalinist Simpli
fications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR
1933-1953.
78. EA. Rees, ‘Stalinism: The Primacy of Politics’, in John Channon (editor), Politics, Society
and Stalinism in the USSR, p. 63.
79. Filtzer, pp. 167-80; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants.
80. Martin Malia, ‘Revolution fulfilled. How the revisionists are still trying to take the ideology
out of Stalinism’, in the Times Literary Supplement, 15 June 2001.
81. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 7.
82. Sarah Davies, ‘ “Us Against Them": Social identity in Soviet Russia, 1934-41’, in Sheila
Fitzpatrick (editor), Stalinism: New Directions, pp. 47-67.
83. Much of the information in this section is from Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism,
pp. 1-114.
84. Vadim Volkov, ‘The Concept of Kul’tum ost’, Notes on the Stalinist civilizing process’, in
Sheila Fitzpatrick (editor), Stalinism: New Directions, pp. 210-28.
85. Stephen Kotidn, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization, chapter 5.
86. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 161.
87. There is a huge literature on Soviet culture; perhaps the two best to serve as an introduc
tion are James von Geldern and Richard Stites (editors), Mass Culture in Soviet Russia:
Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays and Folklore, 1917-1953, and Hans Gunther (editor),
The Culture o f the Stalin Period.
88. Quoted in Conquest, p. 306.
89. Andre Gide, Back From the USSR, p. 78.
90. An excellent recent biography is by Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich, A Life Remembered.

91. Richard Taylor, ‘Soviet Cinema - The Path to Stalin', in History Today, vol. 40, July 1990,
p. 48. For a full treatment of Soviet cinema see Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society,
1917-1953.
92. Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment', in Sheila Fitzpatrick (editor),
Stalinism: New Directions, pp. 3J3-39.
93. Terry Martin, ‘Modernization or Neo-traditionalism?', in Sheila Fitzpatrick (editor),
Stalinism: New Directions, pp. 360-1.
»\
■M 7 The G reat Patriotic W a r and
Stalin’s last years, 19 4 1- 5 3
Summary of events
For the whole of the period from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953, Stalin
remained in supreme power. During the later 1920s the USSR continued to be
treated very much as a state to be shunned by the world's other major powers,
especially as the Comintern still seemed intent on stirring up trouble wherever
possible. Only Germany was consistently friendly towards the USSR, as both
countries saw the advantages of having at least one ally. Stalin's great fear was
that the capitalist states would form an alliance with the express purpose of
destroying the Soviet Union and communism, thus removing the danger of world
revolution; his foreign policy was directed towards preventing such developments.
At the beginning of the 1930s the USSR's international position seemed to be
improving; all the other leading states except the USA had granted official diplo
matic recognition to the Soviet government, and a number of countries had
signed trade agreements and non-aggression pacts with Moscow.
But the situation soon changed dramatically for the worse:
September 1931 - the Japanese invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria,

bordering on the USSR in the Far East. Stalin was suspicious of Japanese
motives and feared they might try to expand into Soviet territory.
January 1933 - Hitler, the sworn enemy of Communism, came to power in

Germany; although Stalin tried to continue good relations, the Soviet Union's
only close ally now became her most dangerous potential enemy. The USSR felt
threatened from both east and west, and a radical change was clearly needed in
Soviet foreign policy.
Maxim Litvinov, collective security and the popular front Litvinov, the Soviet
Commissar for Foreign Affairs from 1930 until 1938, sought protection with his
policy of collective security - trying to persuade the peaceful nations of the world,
particularly Britain, France and the USA, to act together to curb the aggressive
powers - Germany, Japan and Italy. Even the Comintern agreed to co-operate
with non-communist parties, encouraging the formation of a ‘popular front' in
the attempt to defeat Fascism. But Britain, France and the USA were desperate to
avoid war; Litvinov failed to galvanize them into action, and Hitler and Mussolini
were allowed to get away with a long series of breaches of the Versatiles peace
The Great Patriotic W ar 267

Settlement. Stalin, also anxious to avoid war, was convinced that Britain and
France were planning to embroil the USSR in a war with Nazi Germany.
August 1939 - the Nazi-Soviet (Ion-Aggression Pact. Apparently aiming to delay

the outbreak of war between the USSR and Germany as long as possible, Stalin
amazed the rest of the world by signing this agreement, which included secret
clauses providing for the division of Poland between Stalin and Hitier. With his
eastern front secure, Hitler was able to invade Poland and overrun most of
western Europe, except Britain, without any interference from the Russians.
June 1941 to May 1945 - war between the USSR and Germany - The Great Patri
otic War. Although Stalin did his best to keep his side of the Pact and refused to
accept that Hitier was planning to attack, the USSR was forced into the Second
World War on 22 June 1941 when the Germans launched a massive invasion -
Operation Barbarossa. The Russians, unprepared for such an onslaught, at first
suffered widespread defeats on all fronts: an enormous area in the west of the
country was overrun, Leningrad was besieged for 900 days but was eventually
relieved, and Moscow was almost captured but managed to survive. In the south
the Germans captured Rostov-on-Don and were pushing towards Stalingrad and
the oilfields of the Caucasus.
The Battle of Stalingrad - August 1942 to January 1943 - was the great turning
point in the war. The German Sixth Army captured probably three-quarters of
the city, but was then surrounded by vast Soviet reinforcements and compelled
to surrender. The Russians gradually pushed the Germans back, although they
resisted fiercely, and it was August 1944 before Soviet forces reached Poland.
In January 1945 the Red Army entered East Prussia and on 2 May completed the
capture of Berlin. Although the USSR had received considerable help from Britain
and the USA, there can be no doubt that it was Soviet forces which played the
major role in the defeat of Hitler’s Germany and her allies.
The beginning of the Cold War. Towards the end of the Second World War
relations between the USSR and her two main allies, Britain and the USA, began
to deteriorate. In spite of the extensive help which they had sent to Russia in the
shape of supplies and war materials, Stalin suspected that they still wanted to
destroy communism. He believed that their delay in launching a ‘second front’ -
an invasion of France (which did not take place until June 1944) - was a deliberate
ploy to keep most of the pressure on the Russians and bring them to the point of
exhaustion. Two conferences were held between the allies - at Yalta and Potsdam
(February and July 1945) - and although the first one seemed to be a success, at
Potsdam there were disagreements over the future of Poland and Germany.
Eventually relations between the USSR and the West became so strained that
although no actual conflict took place, the decade after 1945 saw the first phase
of what became known as the Cold War. It was a period in which the rival powers
attacked each other with propaganda and economic measures, and generally
refused to co-operate.
*V
Stalin takes over eastern Europe. Between 1945 and 1949 Stalin, wanting to put
as much space as possible between the USSR and the West, took control of most
of the states of eastern Europe, doing whatever was necessary to enable com
munist governments to come to power in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria,
Yugoslavia, Albania, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. At the same time the USA,
as the main enemy of communism, did its best to build up an anti-communist
bloc of states.
The Soviet Union devastated at the end of the war. The entire western part of the
country which had been occupied by the Germans was a complete ruin, and
many people would have been happy to see the end of Stalin. However, Stalin
and his system had survived the test of war, and he was determined that his
dictatorship and the one-party state should continue. The terror methods of
control, and other harsh policies which had been relaxed somewhat during the
war, were resumed. More politicians were executed and when he died in 1953
he was on the point of launching another purge. He left behind enormous
problems - in agriculture, industry, administration and above all in the ludicrous
over-centralization of the State.
• Why did Stalin leave the USSR so unprepared for the German invasion in
June 1941?
• Was Stalin preparing for a 'preventive' war with Germany?
• Could the USSR have won the war without Stalin and his methods?
• Who was to blame for the Cold War, Stalin or the West?
• Is there anything positive to be said for Stalin and his 'achievements'?
7.1 Foreign relations and the background to war

(a) The USSR and its place in the world
The capitalist states continued to view the USSR with the utmost suspicion,
although as we saw earlier (section 5.7(b)) the Soviet state was not completely
isolated in world affairs since the signing of the Rapallo Treaty with Germany in
1922. It seemed a rather unlikely alliance between the two outcast nations of
Europe, but the link was that both of them were opposed to the Versailles peace
settlement; the agreement benefited both sides. The USSR was hoping to get
access to the latest military technology and strategic thinking, while Germany
needed iron ore and oil, and somewhere to develop armaments and carry out
military training which was forbidden in Germany itself by the peace settlement.
However, relations were not entirely smooth: the Comintern (see section 5.7(a))
continued to try and stir up revolution in Germany, so it should have come as no
surprise to Moscow that in the mid-1920s the Germans, with Gustav Stresemann
in charge of foreign policy, began to aim for better relations with Britain and

France. At a conference in London in 1924 an agreement known as the Dawes Plan
was reached allowing Germany longer to pay war reparations to the victorious
powers and providing the Germans with a large American loan. In 1925 a series
of agreements known as the Locarno Treaties was signed by Germany, France,
Britain, Italy, Belgium and Czechoslovakia. Germany, France and Belgium prom
ised to respect their joint frontiers, and Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia
agreed to submit any disputes between the three of them to arbitration. Although
there were some glaring omissions from the treaties - for example, Germany did
not promise to guarantee her frontiers with Poland and Czechoslovakia - it
seemed that reconciliation between the Germans and their former enemies in
the West was well under way. In 1926 Germany was allowed to join the League
of Nations.
These developments caused consternation in the People's Commissariat of
Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel) in Moscow. The readmittance of the Germans
into European affairs was seen by Georgi Chicherin, the Commissar for Foreign
Affairs, as a deliberate attempt to lure them away from their alliance with the
USSR, leaving the Russians totally isolated. However, it was not a complete dis
aster for the USSR: the Germans wanted to keep all options open, and there were
good reasons for wanting to continue the relationship with Moscow. Both Germany
and the USSR were united in their distrust of Poland; their secret military
arrangements and their trade links were working well. Consequently, in April
1926 a new agreement was signed by the Germans and Russians in Berlin, pro
viding for a continuation of the Rapallo Treaty; each of the two powers also
promised not to take part in any hostile military or economic action against the
other, and to remain neutral if the other state was attacked. Britain and France
were not too happy about this new agreement, but did not protest, since they
were anxious to maintain their own good relations with Germany.
The year 1927 proved to be full of problems for the USSR. Relations with
Britain deteriorated sharply when the British Conservative government ordered
a police raid on the London premises of Arcos, a Soviet trade delegation which
was suspected of being the centre of a spying organization. The British claimed
to have found incriminating documents; the trading mission was expelled and
diplomatic relations with the USSR were suspended. Stalin retàliated by ordering
the arrest of some British residents in Moscow. At the same time there were
problems with China. During 1915 and 1916 China disintegrated into hundreds
of small states, each controlled by a warlord and his private army. General Chiang
Kai-shek, leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party since 1925, was struggling to
destroy the warlords and unite the country again. The Nationalists were working
together with the Chinese Communist Party (founded in 1921), and the Soviet
government was providing aid to both parties in the hope that a reunited China
would be friendly towards the USSR. However, in spite of his Soviet connections,
Chiang was not a communist; by 1927 he had decided that the nationalists were
strong enough to do without communist help and that the Communist Party
must be destroyed before it became powerful enough to challenge the nationalists.
He launched a brutal ‘purification’ campaign in which thousands of communists
and trade unionists were killed, and yet Stalin insisted that the communists
should try and continue the alliance. Stalin’s reasoning was that the Chinese
i \
Communist Party was as yet too small to be able to bring about a full-scale pro
letarian revolution; they should therefore work with the middle-class nationalists
to unify China, and the workers’ revolution could come later. Stalin’s attitude
aroused bitter criticism from Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev who accused him
of betraying the Chinese communists. Eventually Mao Zedong, one of the com
munist leaders, rejected Stalin’s orders and concentrated on survival. The failure
of its Chinese policy was a serious embarrassment for the Soviet government.
Even more uncomfortable were developments on the USSR’s western frontier:
the Polish leader, General Pilsudski, was clearly aligning his country with the
West and taking a strong anti-Soviet stance. This did nothing to quell Stalin’s
fears of a capitalist plot for a joint attack on the USSR. On the other hand, the
activities of the Comintern did nothing to lessen Western suspicions of the Soviet
government.
By the early 1930s there were signs that the USSR's international position
might be improving. In 1927 a Russian delegation had attended a meeting in
Geneva called to plan and prepare a major Disarmament Conference. Maxim
Litvinov, who was to become Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs in July 1930,
impressed delegates with his demand for immediate disarmament. In 1929 the
new British Labour government resumed diplomatic relations and opened nego
tiations with Moscow for a fresh trade treaty. Another trade agreement was signed
with Germany in 1931, and the same year, non-aggression and trade agreements
were signed with Turkey and Afghanistan. Most of the world’s important states,
with the exception of the USA, had by this time given formal recognition to the
Soviet government; and in 1932 the USSR signed more non-aggression pacts -
with Poland, France, Finland, Latvia and Estonia. With the capitalist nations still
suffering the effects of the world economic crisis which began with the 1929 Wall
Street Crash, Stalin was able to present the USSR as an economically successful
state, which wished only for peace and international recognition.
In spite of this network of non-aggression and trade agreements, there were
some worrying signs for the USSR - from Japan and from Germany. Japan, like
the other capitalist states, was suffering severe economic difficulties because of
the world depression. Desperate to find new outlets for their exports, the Japanese
cast envious eyes towards China, which was still tom by civil war between
Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and the communists. In 1931 the Japanese invaded
and occupied the Chinese province of Manchuria which, with its population of
around 30 million, would provide a valuable new market for Japanese exports.
China appealed to the League of Nations, which condemned the Japanese action
and ordered them to withdraw their troops from Manchuria. However, when the
Japanese refused and withdrew from the League (March 1933), no action was
taken against them. League action depended on the attitude of its two most
powerful members - Britain and France; since both of them were suffering the
effects of the depression, they decided against economic sanctions in case they
led to war, which they felt ill-equipped to win. The USA was in its isolationist
phase - not wanting to get involved in European affairs; it had declined to join
the League of Nations at its inception, and now it refused to intervene against
Japan. The League had suffered a humiliating blow and the Japanese were firmly
established in Manchuria, which they set up as the puppet state of Manchukuo.

This was an alarming development for the Russians, since Manchuria bordered
on the Soviet Far East. They were afraid that the Japanese might attempt to
expand into Siberia, and some leading Russians suspected that Britain, France
and the USA were deliberately working to bring about war between Japan and
the USSR. How else could their lamentable response to Japanese aggression
against China be explained except as an encouragement to Japan to engage in
further aggression, this time against the USSR?
Even more worrying for the Soviet government were the developments in
Germany which led to the appointment of Hitler as German Chancellor in
January 1933. In fact, Russian policy was to some extent to blame for what
happened in Germany. Stalin had consistently underestimated the threat from
Hitler and the Nazis, and had allowed the Comintern to dictate a disastrous
policy to the German Communist Party (KPD). The series of abortive uprisings
prompted by Comintern agents in Germany did much to nurture the growing
fear of communism which Hider was able to exploit. Worse still, at its Sixth Con
gress, in 1928, the Comintern resolved that non-communist left-wing parties,
such as the German Social Democrats (SPD), were just as dangerous as fascism;
communists therefore must not co-operate with social democrats or trade
unions, and must expel any members who were thought to be 'Rightists'. This
policy had the most catastrophic effects in Germany where the KPD, instead of
allying with the SPD to defeat the Nazis, actually campaigned against the SPD,
dismissing them as 'social fascists' whose aim was to delay genuine revolution.
This fatally split the left during the crucial period in the early 1930s when Nazi
strength was growing and Hitler was manoeuvring for power, and perhaps
destroyed the best chance of creating a barrier to keep the Nazis out. Once Hitler
was in power, Soviet-German relations took a sharp turn for the worse: within
a few months the German Communist Party and the SPD had been outlawed, the
socialist trade unions had been dissolved, and Hider was almost undisputed
dictator. Germany's military co-operation with the USSR was brought to an
abrupt end by Hider, and although economic co-operation continued,’ Hitier's
anti-communist and anti-Soviet views were well known. In the long term there
could be no realistic future for the alliance with Germany, and it was clear that
some dramatic changes would have to take place in Soviet foreign policy.
(b) Litvinov and the shift to collective security

Maxim Litvinov, the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs from 1930, was given
a fairly free hand in foreign policy. He had the full confidence and backing of
Stalin, and survived the Purges and the Terror; even after 1939, when he was
replaced by Molotov, he was allowed to live quietly in retirement with his wife.
Many observers were surprised at the close relationship between Litvinov and
Stalin, since they seemed to be poles apart. Litvinov was Jewish and an ‘old'
Bolshevik - he had first joined the party in 1903, whereas Stalin was personally
anti-Semitic and was busy eliminating most of the old Bolsheviks during the
1930s. Litvinov was an internationalist who had travelled widely, spoke several
languages and was married to an Englishwoman who was also Jewish. Stalin had
travelled very little outside thç USSR, and knew nothing of foreign languages.
i \
This is probably the reason why Stalin allowed Litvinov such freedom; lacking
confidence in his own knowledge of international affairs, he felt that foreign
policy was not really his metier, and he depended heavily on the experienced and
sophisticated Litvinov.1
Even before Hitler came to power Litvinov was convinced that it was time to
move away from the Rapallo strategy of entente with Germany and to aim for
improved relations with Britain and France and also with the USA, which had
still not formally recognized the Soviet government. With Hitler firmly in power,
new approaches became more urgent, especially after the Germans walked out
of the World Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations in 1933 and
signed a non-aggression pact with Poland in 1934. As a Jew, Litvinov was bound
to feel a personal antipathy towards the violently anti-Semitic Nazi regime, and
he was keen to take advantage of the anxieties of the Western powers at the grow
ing threats from Germany and Japan. Litvinov aimed to strengthen the security
of the USSR by forming a network of alliances with these powers, which would
act together to curb the potential aggressors. This was known as a policy of
‘collective security'. However, Soviet foreign policy continued to be confused:
Stalin himself was so anxious to avoid war between the USSR and Germany that
he seemed prepared to go to almost any lengths to try and maintain reasonable
relations. Another trade agreement was signed in March 1934 and regular eco
nomic meetings took place between German and Soviet representatives through
out the 1930s. The Russians were continually angling for improved political
relations but their proposals were invariably rejected by the Nazis.
Meanwhile Litvinov pressed ahead, with some success, with his policy of col
lective security, making a good impression on the Western powers. ‘The portly,
jolly, bustling Litvinov,’ in the words of Nikolai Tolstoy, ‘appeared a genuinely
humane and civilized statesman... in contrast to the bloody past of the Soviet
regime.’2In November 1933 he went to Washington and agreement was reached
with the new Roosevelt government on formal recognition of the USSR. The
American change of heart came when they realized that the USSR might be use
ful in restraining Japanese expansion. Before the end of the year the Politburo
voted in favour of collective security, and the following year the USSR became
a member of the League of Nations. In May 1935 a Franco-Soviet pact of peace
and friendship was signed and two weeks later a similar agreement was reached
with Czechoslovakia.
At the same time the Comintern also began to change its policy, under the
influence of the Bulgarian Communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov. He had gained
an international reputation when he was arrested and tried in Germany on
charges of involvement in the burning of the German Reichstag building in 1933.
At his trial in Leipzig he defended himself so brilliantly that he was acquitted;
when he arrived in Moscow early in 1934 he was greeted as a conquering hero,
and was summoned to appear before the Politburo. He argued passionately that
communists should work with social democrats against fascism; after some
initial hesitation, Stalin seems to have decided that Dimitrov's ideas were at least
worth a try. In April 1934 it was agreed that Dimitrov should become Secretary-
General of the Comintern, with the promise of full support from the Politburo.
The French communists did not wait for official instructions from the Comintern:

in July 1934 they signed an agreement with the French Socialist Party on a joint
strategy against fascism and promised to stop criticizing each other. The rift in
the French left had been healed and the new alliance of communists and social
democrats soon became known as the Popular Front. The Comintern approved
this new Popular Front strategy for all communist parties and it was adopted as
official policy at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in August
1935.
This new twin policy of collective security and the Popular Front did not please
everybody in Soviet government and Comintern circles. Some members of the
Comintern continued to believe that revolution was still a practicable possibility
in central and western Europe and deplored the fact that the new strategy
seemed to postpone it indefinitely. There was criticism of Litvinov’s pacts with
France and Czechoslovakia, two countries which, until recently, had been con
sistently denounced by the Soviets - France because it was capitalist and imperi
alist, and Czechoslovakia because it was a creation of the Versailles settlement
which the USSR had always opposed. On close examination, the agreements
seemed to be very weak affairs: although the USSR had promised to help its allies
in case of ‘an unprovoked attack on the part of a European state’, this was only
on condition that France acted first. Since the ‘European state' in question was
obviously Germany, this raised another problem: the USSR had no common
frontier with either Germany or Czechoslovakia, so Soviet troops would have to
pass through Poland or Romania in order to take any effective action. Neither
state was likely to give permission for such action, especially since Poland had
just signed the ten-year non-aggression pact with Germany. The capitalists were
afraid of the threat from Germany, but they distrusted the communist USSReven
more. Moreover, in some ways the twin policies even seemed to work against
each other. As Jonathan Haslam explains: ‘The very governments which Litvinov
was so persistently attempting to win over in an alliance against Germany were
the governments which looked with alarm at the Popular Front as a {hreat to
their survival. As well as facilitating and complementing the policy of collective
security, the Popular Front unfortunately also complicated and undermined the
fulfilment of an already impossible task.’3Nevertheless, once Stalin had given his
blessing to the new strategy, all open criticism was stifled.
(c) The failure of collective security

Sadly Litvinov’s attempts to galvanize the Western powers into collective action
against aggression ended in failure. Time and time again between 1935 and 1939,
Britain and France failed to take decisive measures against acts of aggression by
Italy, Germany and Japan. This was partly because their economic weakness
made them desperate to avoid war, but it was also to some extent because they
did not trust Stalin. Although Litvinov seemed convincing, British and French
ruling circles found it difficult to believe that Stalin himself would be prepared to
commit Soviet troops to fight alongside them to curb German aggression. For his
part Stalin certainly distrusted the West: he suspected that they were planning
either to involve the USSR in war with Germany, so that both communism and
fascism would be weakened, or that they might form an alliance with Hitler aimed
I V
274 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rushan History

at destroying the USSR. Stalin's primary aim was to keep out of war and prevent
the formation of a European alliance against the Soviet state, and it was for this
reason that he continued Soviet trade contacts and discussions with Germany.
The catalogue of breaches of the Versailles settlement and acts of aggression
began in March 1935 when Hitler announced the réintroduction of conscription
in Germany. Britain, France and Italy protested at this violation of the peace
agreement, but their solidarity was short-lived: in June 1935 the British, without
consulting anybody else, signed a naval agreement with Hitler allowing the
Germans to build submarines (another breach of Versailles) and a battle-fleet,
provided this was limited to 35 per cent of the size of the British fleet. In October
1935 Mussolini launched an Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), against
which the League of Nations offered only ineffective economic sanctions. In
March 1936 Hitler sent German troops into the Rhineland, an area which had
been demilitarized by Versailles; again Britain and France protested but took no
action to expel the Germans. Encouraged by this series of limp responses, Hitler
and Mussolini signed a pact of friendship known as the Berlin-Rome Axis (October
1936); the following month Hitler signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan;
Italy joined in 1937 and the three states pledged themselves to destroy commun
ism. This opened up the possibility of a nightmare scenario for the USSR - a war
on two fronts - which the Soviet army was in no state to cope with. When the
Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Hitler and Mussolini sent help to the rebel
right-wing forces of General Franco; the USSR sent help to the opposing repub
lican government forces, but Britain and France refused to intervene and in 1939
the war ended in victory for Franco. Meanwhile in the Far East the Japanese
advanced from Manchuria and by the autumn of 1938 had occupied a huge area
of China as far south as Nanking and Shanghai. In Europe Hitler sent his forces to
occupy Austria (March 1938) which was incorporated in Germany - a move spe
cifically forbidden by Versailles. When no counter-measures were taken, Hitler
began to look towards neighbouring Czechoslovakia for his next project.
The USSR's part in many of these events was minimal In the case of Mussolini’s
invasion of Abyssinia, the USSR protested strongly and imposed economic sanc
tions banning the export of war materials to Italy. However, Britain and France,
although they imposed some trade sanctions, carefully avoided a ban on vital
goods such as oil and coal This rendered all the sanctions ineffective, Mussolini
consolidated his hold on Abyssinia, and the Russians were left complaining
bitterly against 'British perfidy'. When German troops marched into the Rhine
land in 1936, the French were best placed to send troops to clear the Germans
out. Litvinov urged France to act, arguing that it was a question of preventing
German hegemony over the whole continent of Europe. However, the British,
anxious to keep on good terms with Hitler, pressurized the French to take no
action, and the French government succumbed to Britain’s wishes, in spite of
their pact with the USSR. On every occasion it was the USSR which urged
decisive action only to be let down primarily by the British with their policy of
appeasing the aggressors, and by a weak France, which usually followed the Brit
ish lead. When the Germans annexed Austria (an operation known as the
Anschluss), Litvinov told the Politburo ‘the seizure of Austria represents the most
important event since the world war, fraught with the greatest dangers and not

least for our Union;’ Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, warned the
British that Hitler’s next target was clearly going to be Czechoslovakia; but no
response was forthcoming, either from Stalin or the Western powers. During the
Spanish Civil War even the Popular Front government in France failed to send
help to the Spanish left. By March 1938 the USSR still had no reliable allies, and
Litvinov’s collective security policy seemed close to collapse.
The USSR’s contradictory policies in Spain served to heighten the general dis
trust of Stalin and his motives. This was an example of the Soviet government
and the Comintern carrying out their new policy of encouraging 'popular fronts’
against fascist aggressors. Soviet agents went to Spain to help organize the pro-
republican forces, and large amounts of military equipment were sent, although
the republic was required to pay the USSR for its assistance. Stalin’s motives
were devious to say the least; the Spanish left was split between the communists
and more extreme TrotskyitesLand anarchists, who were aiming for a complete
socialist revolution at the expense of the ‘bourgeois’ republic. Stalin did not want
this sort of revolutionary republican victory because he was afraid that it would
frighten France and Britain into forming an anti-Soviet front with Germany.
Consequently, he ordered the communists to fight for the ‘bourgeois’ republic
and tried to curb the extremists. This was bitterly resented by the Trotskyites and
anarchists, and in Barcelona in 1937 the communists ended up fighting and
defeating the anarchists who were trying to take control of the republican gov
ernment. This internal strife on the left contributed to the ultimate defeat of the
republican forces in 1939. It is difficult to see what advantages the USSR gained
from its intervention in Spain apart from getting its hands on the republic’s gold
reserves in payment for assistance. True, it demonstrated that the Soviet govejii-
ment was prepared to take military action, but in the main the policy succeeded
only in confusing and alienating those on the political left in other countries who
should have been sympathetic.
It was Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakia which brought the final collapse of
collective security. Soon after the takeover of Austria in March 1938, Hitler began
to demand an area known as the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. This was an
area bordering on Germany and containing a large German minority, and it had
been included in Czechoslovakia against the wishes of Germany by the Versailles
settlement in 1919. Hitler threatened to use force against Czechoslovakia if
necessary. The USSR, invoking the 1935 treaties with the Czechs and the French,
made it clear that it would defend Czechoslovakia if the French also came to its
aid; hints were also dropped that some sort of aid would be forthcoming even if
the French did nothing. The Red Army began to prepare for action and some
90 divisions were mobilized; the Czechs also prepared to resist the threatened
German invasion. However, both Britain and France were unwilling to go to war
over Czechoslovakia and began to put pressure on the Czechs to give way to
Hitler. As Maisky put it, British policy was directed ‘not at curbing the aggressor,
but at curbing the victim of aggression.’
In the midst of the Czech crisis there was more trouble for the USSR in the Far
East, along the frontier with lapanese-occupied Manchuria. At the end of luly
1938 lapanese forces launched an attack,on the hills above Lake Khasan, which
were an important surveillance point occupied by Soviet troops. After some
C V
sharp exchanges lasting just over a week, in which the Japanese failed to make
any headway, a cease-fire was agreed on 11 August. The Russians apparently
had intelligence information that the Japanese government was merely testing
Soviet resolve and had no intention of escalating the conflict into an open war.
The Soviet government made great propaganda use of their success, emphasizing
the strength of their forces and pointing out the value of showing firmness and
the will to resist aggressors. In September Soviet troops began to move up to the
frontier with Poland which was also now demanding territory from Czechoslovakia
But it made no difference to the attitudes of Britain and France: British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain was determined to pursue his policy of appeasing
Hitler, and suggested a conference, an offer which Hitler accepted. On 30 Sep
tember 1938 the conference was held in Munich, attended by Chamberlain,
Daladier (the French Prime Minister), Mussolini and Hitler. The Russians were
not invited and not even consulted; even the Czech representatives took no part
in the discussions. It was agreed that the Sudetenland was to be handed over to
Germany and that if the Czechs refused, they would receive no help from Britain
and France when the Germans invaded. In the end the USSR was spared having
to decide whether or not to act alone - the Czechs felt they had little choice but to
accept the conference decision, and there was no further question of resistance
to Hitler.
There has been much speculation as to whether Stalin would have supported
the Czechs if they had decided to reject the conference ultimatum. There is some
evidence, though it is not entirely conclusive, that Stalin did intend to take some
action. As well as the troops already on the Polish frontier, a further 330,000
Soviet reservists were called up, and leave cancelled in all military districts west
of the Urals; 700 aircraft were offered to the Czech government; even Romania
agreed, after some pressure, to allow the passage of 100,000 Soviet troops to go to
the aid of Czechoslovakia.4 It may all have been a huge bluff, but from the latest
military memoirs to appear, it seems certain that Soviet troops would have
moved against Poland if the Poles had attacked Czechoslovakia. As to Germany,
Stalin himself was probably undecided on exactly what action to take. The Mun
ich settlement came as a great shock to the Russians who felt betrayed by the
West Stalin was convinced that it was part of a conspiracy by all the anti-Soviet
nations of Europe to encourage Hitler to turn eastwards and to give him a free
hand to destroy the now isolated Soviet Union. Collective security had failed and
neither Litvinov nor Stalin knew which way to turn next. For a time the Soviet
government seemed to be retreating into isolation, but it wasn’t long before
dramatic events precipitated by Hitler changed the international situation again.
(d) The Nazi-Soviet Pact and the outbreak of war in Europe

In March 1939 German troops occupied the Czech capital, Prague, and the prov
inces of Bohemia and Moravia, and the eastern province of Slovakia was declared
an independent state, but in effect became a German puppet state. These actions
provoked a sudden change in the attitude of the British who were outraged that
Hitler, without any negotiations, had seized territory not inhabited by Germans,
the neutrality of which he had promised to respect at Munich. Chamberlain now

abandoned his appeasement policy and began to sound out the USSR, Poland,
Yugoslavia* Turkey, Greece and Romania as to whether they would support
Britain and France in action against any further German aggression. Suddenly
collective security seemed to be on the cards again; however, when Litvinov
responded by proposing an immediate conference in Bucharest to discuss com
mon action, Chamberlain rejected the idea as 'premature'. On 17 April the USSR
offered to sign an alliance with Britain and France, to guarantee the integrity of
every state from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Again the two Western powers
hardly responded, evidently assuming that Stalin was not sincere, but also prob
ably because they were unwilling to guarantee the Baltic states. In fact there was
a problem: the Poles refused to sign any agreement which also included the
USSR; they hated the Soviet government and would rather fight Germany alone
than accept ‘help’from the USSR which might turn into a permanent occupation;
they were afraid that co-operatipn with the USSR might provoke Hitler, who was
now making territorial demands on Poland. At the end of March Chamberlain
announced that Britain and France would help the Poles if any action threatened
their independence and the Poles felt it vital to resist However, the British and
French realized that it would be impossible for them to offer any effective help to
Poland without Soviet co-operation, and so they continued to work for an agree
ment with the USSR, even though they had doubts about Soviet military capabil
ity and trustworthiness. Another advantage of such an agreement was that it
would presumably prevent a pact between Stalin and Hitler. Ironically, Hitler
had also decided to seek an agreement with the USSR, even if only a temporary
one, in order to isolate Poland and thwart Britain and France. In April 1939, in
a major speech on foreign affairs, Hitler omitted his usual tirade against-the
Soviet Union. The USSR, instead of being an outcast nation, suddenly found
itself eagerly wooed by both opposing blocs in Europe. It was no doubt in order
to cope better with this new situation that Stalin decided to have a change of
Foreign Minister. According to Donald Watt, 'a new man was needed, more
senior, closer to Stalin, hard, obstinate, unclubbable, uncharmable, a man to
keep everything in his own hands, a man capable of calculated obtuseness or
deliberate rudeness if necessary.’5 On 3 May 1939 the pro-Westem and Jewish
Litvinov was dismissed and replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand
man since 1917.
Throughout the summer of 1939 the Western powers and Germany continued
negotiations with the USSR. Stalin may well have preferred an alliance with
Britain and France, but pinning them down proved difficult. The British Foreign
Minister was invited to Moscow but when a negotiating team eventually went to
the USSR, it contained nobody of cabinet rank and no leading military figure; the
most senior member was a military attaché, Admiral Drax, who had not been
given any bargaining powers and had to keep contacting the Foreign Office. The
lack of urgency was shown by the fact that instead of flying directly to Moscow,
they travelled by slow passenger boat which took five days to get to Leningrad.
Although progress had already been made on political matters, the talks soon
stalled when it came to military details. In spite of strong pressure from the
French and British, the Poles expressed the most extreme distrust of the Russians
and refused point blank to allow Soviet troops to cross Polish territory to take up
*\
positions on the Polish frontier with Germany, although it was obvious to the
whole of Europe that Hitler was preparing to invade Poland in the near future.
Since the British and French had no specific military plans of their own to bring
aid to Poland, the talks broke up on 21 August without any agreement. Britain
and France seemed so irresolute that Stalin and Molotov could not imagine
either of them standing by their guarantee to help Poland.
Developments were pointing more and more to an agreement with Germany,
especially since during the summer there was further trouble with the Japanese
in the Far East. In May 1939 Japanese forces occupied Mongolian territory right
on the frontier with the USSR, and early in August they were planning a new
offensive. An understanding with Germany would relieve the USSR of the fear of
an attack in the west and leave Soviet forces free to take a more active role against
the Japanese. Stalin began to respond to Germany’s overtures and it was arranged
that the German Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, should come to Moscow. When
Stalin, Molotov and Ribbentrop met on 23 August, it soon became apparent that
the Germans were prepared to make major concessions; by the end of the day
they had drawn up a Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty in which the two states
pledged themselves for the next ten years to avoid war with each other and to
increase trade - the USSR buying more German machinery and supplying
Germany with more coal and oil. But it was the secret clauses in the agreement
which were the most explosive: in effect they agreed to partition Poland, the east
ern section coming under Soviet control and the western part under Germany.
As for the Baltic states, Lithuania was to be taken by Germany, and Estonia,
Latvia and Finland by the USSR, which was also to be allowed to take Bessarabia,
given to Romania in 1918. This was a triumph for Stalin: the USSR was about to
recover all the territory lost in 1917-18 and that taken by Poland in 1920, plus
more of Poland. Hitler was pleased with the Pact because it meant that he could
go ahead with his invasion of Poland knowing that no help would be forthcoming
for the Poles from the USSR; Ribbentrop assured him that the British and French
guarantees to Poland would no longer count.
The announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact caused consternation in the
capitals of Europe. The unthinkable had happened - the two bitter ideological
arch-enemies had shelved their differences and come together. In London, how
ever, the resolve of the British government to honour its guarantee to Poland
remained strong. It was the Japanese who reacted with the greatest dismay, feel
ing humiliated and betrayed by their ally in the Anti-Comintern Pact. At the same
time Soviet forces, commanded by General Georgi Zhukhov and using tanks for
the first time in Russian military history, inflicted a heavy defeat on the Japanese
in Mongolia. On 15 September a ceasefire was agreed. For the time being the
USSR could feel safe from invasion on both eastern and western fronts.
Having secured the neutrality of the USSR, Hitler wasted no time: on 1 Septem
ber German forces invaded Poland; Britain and France sent an ultimatum order
ing them to withdraw, and when this was rejected, Britain and France declared
war on Germany. Hitler was surprised by this unexpected decisiveness, though
after some initial hysterics, he calmed down since he could not imagine what
action they could possibly take to save Poland. On 17 September, with the fron
tier in the Far East now secured, Soviet troops invaded and occupied their

allotted parts of Poland. The Poles were defeated and on 27 September the USSR
and Germany signed a formal agreement dividing Poland between them. Stalin
assured Ribbentrop personally that he would never break the pact between their
two countries. A second agreement was reached over the future of Lithuania which
Hitler conceded could now come into the Soviet sphere instead of Germany's.
Control of Lithuania was seen as vitally important by Stalin because it would
enable the Russians to block the entrance to the route around the Baltic towards
Leningrad. All three Baltic states - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia - were soon
pressured into signing mutual defence treaties which allowed the USSR to base
troops on their territory.
Frontier talks were also taking place between the USSR and Finland. Stalin was
concerned about the vulnerability of Leningrad, since the border with Finland
was only some 18 miles to the north-west of the city. In October 1939 Stalin put
some proposals to the Finns: the existing frontier should be moved 25 miles
further away from Leningrad; the USSR should take over the islands in the Gulf
of Finland and lease the port of Hanko (to the west of Helsinki) which could be
used as a Russian naval base to control the entrance to the Gulf of Finland; in
return the USSR would give Finland a large bloc of territory further north.
Although these demands were not entirely unreasonable, the Finns were nervous
that once the Russian forces gained access there would be no way of controlling
them. Stalin’s proposals were rejected and consequently Soviet troops invaded
Finland on 30 November, expecting an easy victory. But the Finnish army was far
better equipped for a winter war than the Russians, whose first invasion attempt
was driven back with heavy losses. Time and again massed attacks by Soviet
infantry on defensive strongpoints were driven back with heavy losses because
the preceding artillery bombardment had been ineffective. Stalin was forced to
rethink the campaign: he appointed Timoshenko as commander and gave him
the full resources of the Red Army; in January 1940 the Soviet army launched
a massive artillery bombardment of the Finnish defences known as tha.Manner-
heim Line and then threw nearly a thousand tanks and 140,000 men into the
attack. Even then it took almost three weeks before the Finns were forced to
withdraw. It had not been a total rout, but the Finns were exhausted and running
out of men. A settlement was reached in March 1940 in which the Finns agreed to
hand over much more than Stalin had originally demanded: a larger slice of
territory to the north of Leningrad including the north-eastern shore of Lake
Ladoga, the city of Viborg and the port of Hanko; however, the Finns were allowed
to keep their independence. The Winter War with Finland was in reality a mixed
success for Stalin. The Red Armÿs performance had been far from impressive
and over 200,000 men had been lost against 25,000 Finns killed. The Commissar
for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov, was replaced by Semyon Timoshenko, who was
at least an efficient organizer and was determined to make the Red Army into
a professional, rather than just a revolutionary force. The German General Staff
took careful note of events, and came to the conclusion that the Red Army, in
spite of its huge size, would be no match for their well-trained and well-equipped
army with its superior leadership. It probably helped to convince Hitler that no
Slav army could stand up to the racially Superior Germans. In the words of Alan
Bullock, 'Nothing did more t® convince him in 1941 that he was justified in
»V
gambling on defeating the Russians in a single campaign than their performance
against the Finns.'6
Stalin was in no mood to put up with any more resistance; in July 1940 the
governments of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were ordered to request their
incorporation into the USSR as new Soviet republics. Since the alternative was to
be invaded by the Red Army anyway, the governments complied. In the same
month Stalin annexed Bessarabia from Romania, which had been promised him
in the Nazi-Soviet Pact; he also annexed northern Bukovina from Romania,
which had not been included in the agreement. Having been incorporated into
the USSR the inhabitants of these territories found themselves reorganized along
Soviet lines: industry, land, trade, banks and mines were nationalized and a start
was made on collectivization. But the process was carried out with great brutality,
especially in eastern Poland where Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians took
revenge for grievances suffered during the 20 years of Polish rule. In all the ter
ritories leading people were arrested - intelligentsia, politicians, landowners,
businessmen, clergy, teachers and army officers - and either executed or sent to
labour camps. The aim was to eliminate everybody who might possibly have
organized resistance to the Soviet takeover. The Poles were especially hated
because they had tried to exploit the exhaustion of the Red Army towards the end
of the Civil War in 1920 by invading the Ukraine; this ‘treachery' still rankled with
the Soviet leaders 20 years later. The most notorious case was that of 15,000 Pol
ish reservist officers, all professionals of various types, who were arrested by the
NKVD in September 1939 and sent to labour camps in western Russia. Nothing
further was heard about them after May 1940, but in April 1943 the German
invaders uncovered over 4000 bodies in a camp at Katyn near Smolensk. The
Russians claimed that it was the Germans themselves who had killed them, but
the Germans consistently denied this. In 1989 the Soviet government finally
admitted that the Russians had indeed executed all 15,000.
Meanwhile Hitler’s war was going brilliantly for the Germans; in the spring of
1940 their forces overwhelmed Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg and
the Netherlands. By 15 June they had defeated France; only the British were left
still undefeated in the west and even they had been forced to evacuate their
troops from the European mainland at Dunkirk. It seemed only a matter of time
before they too were eliminated. However, Hitler soon suffered his first major
setback: in the Battle of Britain throughout the late summer of 1940, the RAF
gradually got the better of the German Luftwaffe. Hitler dared not begin his
planned invasion of Britain without superiority in the air; in mid-September he
decided to postpone it for the time being and turned his attention eastwards
again. Hitler’s quick victories were a stunning blow for Stalin, who was hoping
that the war in the west would drag on like the First World War; he expected the
Germans to win eventually, but thought they would be too exhausted to think
about attacking Russia for several years. Tensions were already beginning to show
in the Nazi-Soviet alliance: Hitler, annoyed at Stalin’s annexation of Bukovina,
decided to intervene in the Balkans himself and sent troops into Romania. At
a meeting in Berlin in November 1940 the Germans tried, without success, to
persuade Molotov to switch Soviet expansion in the direction of India and
Central Asia, leaving the Balkans as a largely German sphere of influence.

In fact Hitler had already made the decision at the end of July 1940 for an
attack on the USSR in the spring of 1941. For years he had been thinking vaguely
about a war to win Lebensraum (living space) for the Germans in the east
Euphoric at his successes in western Europe, he now made grandiose plans to
seize the entire area right up to the Urals. Some of the population would be kept
as slaves for the master race, while the rest of the Soviet people would be allowed
a ‘homeland' east of the Urals. Once the Soviet Union was defeated, Britain
would quickly be subdued. By 18 December Hitler had approved plans for the
invasion of the USSR, code-named Operation Barbarossa, to be launched in May
1941 (Document A). In the event the invasion was delayed for a month because
Hitler was sidetracked into helping out his ally Mussolini, who was trying to build
up an Italian empire in the Balkans and expand Italian territory in North Africa.
Italian troops invaded Greece and Egypt, but quickly ran into difficulties, and
German troops had to be sentJo help in both areas. On 5 April Yugoslavia signed
a non-aggression pact with the USSR, much to the annoyance of Hitler who
immediately declared war on Yugoslavia. By the end of April German forces had
defeated both Greece and Yugoslavia and occupied Bulgaria. Final preparations
could now be made for the invasion of the USSR, and the date was fixed: the early
hours of 22 June. After the abysmal showing of the Soviet forces in the war with
Finland, Hitler was convinced that the USSR would be crushed in a short cam
paign: ‘we have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come
crashing down,' he told General Jodi. The target was Moscow; but in the words of
Martin Gilbert: ‘although the day was to come when the tall spires of the Kremlin
were to be visible through the binoculars of his front line commanders, Moscow
was never to be his, and his march to Moscow, Napoleon's downfall in 1812^was
to lead, through suffering and destruction, to the end of all Hitler's plans, and,
within four years, to the downfall of his Reich.’7
7.2 The USSR at war, 1941-45

(a) Stalin and the USSR unprepared
Hitler had gathered an awesome invasion force along the frontiers with the
Soviet Union: 5.5 million troops, 2800 tanks, 5000 aircraft and 47,000 pieces of
artillery. At 3.15 on the morning of 22 June 1941, Operation Barbarossa began.
German bombers attacked 66 Soviet airfields, destroying hundreds of aircraft
on the ground; several important cities including Minsk, Odessa and Sevastopol
were bombed, and the German army entered the USSR along a front stretching
almost a thousand miles. The Soviet forces facing them had not been placed on
alert and had been given orders not to respond to provocation; although Stalin
was informed within 15 minutes about the start of the invasion, he rejected
requests for permission to respond, apparently believing that Hitler was simply
trying to provoke the USSR; it was only at 6.30 am that he gave orders to retali
ate. Gradually over the next few days the scale of the catastrophe became
apparent: on the first day almost a thousand Soviet aircraft were destroyed; by
the end of the fifth day the Germans had captured Dvinsk, 185 miles inside the
I V

border, and had seized the road and rail bridges over the River Dvina. AU along
the front no steps had been taken to destroy important bridges, and although
the frontier had been moved westwards after the incorporation of parts of
Poland into the USSR, no effective fortifications had been put in place along the
new frontier, whUe some of the fortress defences along the old frontier had been
dismantled.
Yet StaUn had been given plenty of warning during the preceding weeks of
an impending German invasion. As early as January 1941 the American Under
Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, gave a warning to the Soviet ambassador in
Washington, based on information picked up in Berlin, that the Germans inten
ded to attack in May or June. ChurchUl had sent Stalin a message on 3 April that
an attack was imminent, and Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, told
Soviet ambassador Maisky the same thing in London at least five times between
April and June. The British inteUigence service had even passed on to Moscow, via
a Soviet spy-ring in Switzerland, the correct date of the invasion and exact detaUs
of where attacks would take place. If Stalin did not trust British and American
sources, simUar information was arriving in Moscow from other informants. The
most remarkable was Richard Sorge, a German communist and intelligence
agent based in Tokyo, who was acting as a Soviet spy. He was on close terms with
the German ambassador in Tokyo, Hermann Ott, who kept him suppfied with aU
the latest military and diplomatic information. On 5 March Sorge informed
Moscow that the Germans planned to attack in mid-June; he continued to send
a stream of reports adding more detaUs until a week before the actual invasion,
when he gave the date and the dispositions of the nine German armies which
would be involved. At about the same time the German ambassador in Moscow,
Count von Schulenburg, who was no supporter of Hitler, and was against the
idea of war between the two states, warned his Soviet counterpart of the impending
attack on 22 June. StaUn’s own inteUigence forces reported on 5 May about the
ominous buUd-up of German troops close to the border with the USSR: ‘MUitary
preparations are going forward openly in Poland. German officers and soldiers
speak openly of the coming war between Germany and the Soviet Union as
a matter already decided. The war is expected to start after the completion of
spring planting.’ At the end of May came reports that the Germans were moving
aU civilians out of border areas, and on 6 June the German border guards were
replaced by field troops. The signs and the warnings multiplied dafiy until by
21 June, in the words of Harrison SaUsbury, ‘the preparations for attack could
hardly have been overlooked by a ten-year old chUd.'8
AU the evidence seems to suggest, however, that in spite of so much advance
warning, StaUn was stunned and devastated by the German attack. He could not
beUeve that Hitler would risk invading the USSR before Britain had been deci
sively defeated, because it would mean a repeat of the fatal scenario - a war on
two fronts - which had led to Germany's defeat in the First World War. He was
under no Ulusions that the Nazi-Soviet Pact would last for anything like its fuU
ten years; he told an audience of young officers on 5 May that war was certain
to come, but that he hoped to stave it off until 1942. On 6 June he approved
a detaUed plan for switching Soviet industry over to war production by the end
of 1942.

Map 7.1 The German invasion of the USSR.
This terrible catastrophe which befell the people of the USSR in June 1941 has
naturally been one of the most controversial and sensitive topics in Soviet
historiography. How could Stalin possibly have been so mistaken about the
timing of the German invasion? Did he actually see and read the intelligence
reports? And if he did, why did he not take more decisive action? The evidence
suggests that Stalin did indeed receive and read the reports, although they were
edited to some extent by the General Staff Intelligence Administration, but that
he ignored information which did not fit in with his own theories and beliefs.
However, it seems likely that he did not show all of them to his military chiefs
t '
who were kept very much in the dark. One strand of his thinking was that Britain
was the real enemy of the USSR; ever since the British had intervened in the Civil
War, Stalin suspected that they were just waiting for a suitable opportunity to
destroy the Soviet Union. Their betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich and their
reluctance to sign an alliance with the USSR in the summer of 1939 convinced
him that they had not changed. During the Soviet-Finnish War there were plans
to send 50,000 British and French troops via northern Norway to help the Finns,
and Stalin was genuinely worried about the possibility of British bombing raids
on Leningrad. Even after the defeat of Finland the British Chiefs of Staff prepared
a report exploring the possible options of an attack on the USSR, for example,
raids on her oil installations in the Caucasus. In March and April 1940 British
reconnaissance flights were made over the oil towns of Baku and Batum reveal
ing that Baku had virtually no anti-aircraft defences. In conversation between the
British and French Prime Ministers, there was mention of 15 May as a possible
date for an aerial attack on Baku. The Germans were depending heavily on the
USSR continuing to supply them with oil; a few well-directed air attacks from
bases in Iraq could put the Soviet oil industry out of action and deal a severe
blow at both countries.9 There was no attack on 15 May, and after the fall of
France in June 1940 the British abandoned the idea; but there is no doubt that
information about British plans was passed on to Stalin's intelligence services by
Gestapo agents. By this time Winston Churchill, a sworn enemy of communism,
was British Prime Minister, and Stalin completely distrusted any information
which emanated from British or American sources. He believed that Churchill
would stoop to anything to bring the USSR into the war against Germany. When
Rudolph Hess suddenly flew to Scotland on 10 May 1941 to try and negotiate
peace, Stalin was convinced that Hess had been invited over by the British
secret service to work out plans for a joint British and German attack on the
Soviet Union.
The other main strand in Stalin's thinking was rather confused: he believed
that although war with Germany was inevitable in the end, it would not come
until 1942, and perhaps not even then if Britain was still undefeated. British and
American warnings he saw as attempts to get the Russians to take some sort of
defensive measures which would upset Hitler and provoke him to attack. This is
why Stalin continued to give the strictest possible orders that his forces must
avoid any action that could be interpreted as provocation. For the same reason
he scrupulously kept the Soviet side of the agreement with the Nazis, actually
stepping up supplies of wheat and oil which continued right up until the invasion;
the last Russian goods train carrying supplies crossed the border into Germany at
midnight on 21 June. By the end of the first week in June 1941 Stalin felt certain
that there would be no attack that year simply because the huge distances that
the German armies would have to cover would make it impossible for them to
complete the conquest of the USSR before the winter set in. Stalin seemed
confident that the Red Army was strong enough to repel the invaders; even if they
penetrated deeply, their lines of communication would become impossibly long
and they would eventually suffer the same fate as Napoleon's Grand Army in
1812. Yet Stalin was perturbed at the German troop build-up in the western part
of Poland; how could that be explained away? Evidence suggests that Stalin genu-

inely believed that Hitler was building up threatening military pressure on the
Soviet Union as a bluff or blackmail, as a preliminary for some new demands for
economic or territorial concessions; when these were eventually presented Stalin
would be able to negotiate with Hitler and reach a satisfactory agreement, as they
had done earlier, and war would be avoided. Another possibility considered by
Stalin was that it was the German generals who wanted to provoke war with the
USSR; in that case there was no need to worry because Hitler himself would
make sure that it did not happen in 1941. Stalin even wrote a personal letter to
Hider saying how surprised he was by the German military preparations which
gave the impression that Hitler was preparing to attack the USSR. Hider sent
a personal letter back explaining, in confidence, that troops were being concen
trated in Poland so that they would be safe from the heavy British bombing of
western and central Germany. He gave his word of honour as head of state that
he would keep the Pact. Açcording to General Zhukov, Stalin believed this
explanation.10Why Stalin felt he could trust Hider remains a mystery - he certainly
trusted nobody else. Once Stalin had made his mind up it was usually impossible
for the people around him to make him change it. And Stalin had made up his
mind that Hider could be trusted; Hider had told him, in confidence, that he
would honour the Nazi-Soviet Pact; therefore there would be no war in 1941.
This made it extremely difficult for his subordinates to make preparations to
meet an attack without risking the wrath of Stalin - and they all knew what that
could mean.
During Khrushchev’s period of de-Stalinization in the late 1950s and early
1960s (see section 8.1(b)), a great deal of evidence came out about Stalin’s
mistakes in the period leading up to the German invasion. According to Admiral
Kuznetsov in his memoirs, Stalin fully expected war with Germany and regarded
the Nazi-Soviet Pact as a ploy to gain time for further preparation. His mistake
was in overestimating the length of time he had available to make these prepara
tions. Another of Kuznetsov's criticisms of Stalin was his secretiveness - most of
the top officers in the Red Army had no idea what the strategic plans were in case
of a sudden attack, or even whether any such plans existed. The people immedi
ately surrounding Stalin were so dominated by him that they were not used to
taking any initiatives and dared not challenge his authority. Soviet historian
A.M. Nekrich in his book 22 June 1941, published in 1965 under the auspices of
the Marxism-Leninism Institute, laid the blame for Russia’s lack of preparedness
entirely on Stalin; it wasn't that Stalin ignored the warnings being presented to
him, he simply put the wrong interpretation on them and refused to believe that
there would be any invasion before the spring of 1942; this, argued Nekrich,
showed how completely out of touch Stalin was with the real world. Very soon
though, the climate of Soviet thinking changed again. Khrushchev had already
fallen from power in 1964, and Stalin gradually began to be rehabilitated.
To begin with, military leaders and historians were encouraged to write memoirs
and articles about Stalin’s role as war leader; they were not forbidden to make
fair criticisms, but the main point of the exercise was to encourage a positive
evaluation of Stalin's cpntribution. Nekrich’s work, which had been well reviewed
both in the USSR and in the eastern European countries and recommended
to the general public, now came »
under attack. His book was discussed at a

conference of historians who came to the conclusion that it was 'politically
harmful'. Nekrich himself was severely censured and expelled from the
Communist Party in June 1967 and his book was banned. The new official line
was put by another historian, GA. Deborin, who claimed that although Stalin had
certainly made mistakes and reached false conclusions, this was because he had
received false information. 'Stalin’s estimate of German intentions was endorsed
by those around him. So Stalin cannot be considered solely responsible for his
mistakes.’11
With the coming of Gorbachev's glasnost and the subsequent collapse of com
munism in the USSR, Stalin’s reputation came under attack once more. Dmitri
Volkogonov was scathing about Stalin’s miscalculations which 'stemmed from
his personal rule. It is hard to blame the Commissars of the Chief War Council
when their boss’s image was that of the wise and infallible leader... To please
Stalin, everyone talked about the "invincibility of the Red Army” ... Zhukov prob
ably put it best when he said that all Stalin’s actions and thoughts on the eve of
the war were subordinated to the single effort to avoid war, and this generated in
him the certain belief that it would not occur.’ Zhukov also made the point that
Stalin resisted all attempts by the military leadership to put the troops on alert on
the western front for fear of provoking Hitler. As Volkogonov comments, 'one can
understand the desire not to give Hitler an excuse to attack, but he can hardly
have imagined that Hitler would attack if provoked, if invasion of the USSR did
not already figure in his plans.12
On the other hand, there were still some Russian historians who felt this inter
pretation was too simplistic. In 1990 a book called Icebreaker: Who Started the
Second World War? was published in English; written by Viktor Suvorov, who had
defected to Britain from Soviet Military Intelligence, the book claimed that Stalin
had intended to attack Germany first, on 6 July 1941. Hitler’s invasion of the
USSR in June was a 'preventive war’ to forestall Stalin. Some German historians
eagerly seized on this theory since it enabled them to portray Hitler’s invasion as
a justifiable action designed to save western Europe from communism. The book
caused a sensation in the USSR; in 1995 a collection of essays was published
based on the latest evidence and generally supporting Suvorov’s interpretation.
For instance in his speech to the officer graduates on 5 May 1941, Stalin had this
to say: ‘Now that we have reconstructed our army, built up sufficient technology
for contemporary warfare, become strong - now is the time to move from the
defensive to the offensive. We have to move from defence to a policy of attack.
The Red Army is a modem army, and a modern army is an offensive army.’Zhukov
was also thinking along the same lines, or so he claimed in his memoirs; on
15 May he sent a note to Stalin proposing that ‘we deprive the German command
of their initiative by forestalling their forces during deployment, by attacking them
at the moment they are at the deployment stage.’ More recently, two Russian
historians, Gabriel Gorodetzky and Dmitri Volkogonov, have both dismissed the
theory. In his last book, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, published in 1998,
Volkogonov argued that although the possibility that Stalin was planning to
attack Hitler first cannot be mied out, there is absolutely no evidence or docu
mentation that he intended to do it in July 1941. Nor was there any evidence to
show how Stalin had reacted to Zhukov's note. ‘It was impossible to contemplate
The G reat Patriotic W ar 287

a large-scale offensive against Germany without a detailed and documented
operational analysis, without creating the necessary army groupings and many
other undertakings. It would be possible to send a unit into battle on verbal
orders only, but never a muld-million-man army. If Stalin was planning to attack
Hitler first, he must have been planning to do it later.'13 The latest British
thoughts on the question have come from John Erickson, in an article in History
Todayymarking the 60th anniversary of the invasion. ‘The Suvorov fantasies, fic
tions and inventions,’ he concludes, ‘do not bear comparison with a horrendous
reality.’14
Wherever the blame lies, it seems indisputable that the USSR was not in a state
of preparedness for the German invasion which began on 22 June 1941. True, the
Russians had been rearming since the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan and
had spent huge amounts of money on it, but as Mark Harrison points out,
‘because the Soviet rearmament pattern aimed at some future war, it was never
ready for war in the present. Changing forecasts and expectations meant that
military plans were always under revision. The armed forces were always in the
midst of re-equipment and reorganization. Military products already in mass
production were always on the verge of obsolescence; defence industries were
always half-way through re-training and re-tooling.'15 During the Spanish Civil
War, for example, Soviet weapons and aircraft were obviously inferior to those
produced in Germany. However, the 20 months of extra preparation time gained
by the Nazi-Soviet Pact had not been wasted; in fact some estimates reckon that
defence output doubled and the size of the Red Army trebled during that period.
By June 1941 there were some 5.5 million men in uniform, and every month
Figure 7.1 German soldiers execute five young men from Velizh, Smolensk district,
suspected o f being partisans, sum m er 1942.

industry was managing to produce 230 tanks, 700 military aircraft, 4000 guns and
mortars, over 100,000 rifles and more than a million shells.
These statistics look encouraging but the overall picture was not nearly so
impressive. A large proportion of the troops were untrained and were using
obsolete weapons, and most of the tanks were obsolete. The most up-to-date tanks
were only just coming into mass production in lune 1941, and it was a similar
story with aircraft - the new YAK-1 and MiG-3 fighters. The army command had
not recovered from the purges of 1937-38 when all the most experienced gen
erals and officers had been executed. Their immature and inexperienced
replacements obediently accepted Stalin’s view of military strategy, which was
quite simply that if the Germans attacked, the Red Army would immediately plug
any breaches of the defences that the Germans might make, and then it would
drive them out and ‘crush the enemy on his territory;' it would be a short war and
an easy victory. Those who had suggested that German forces might be strong
enough to penetrate deeply and that therefore plans should be made for defence
in depth in the interior, had been accused of being in league with the enemy;
many had been shot and others were still in prison. Stalin seemed so confi
dent that obvious precautions were ignored; discussion had taken place about
relocating armaments factories much further eastwards, but very little had actu
ally been done; work had started on fortifying the newly annexed territories in
the west, but there was no sense of urgency. Advisers suggested that supply
dumps should be moved further eastwards, beyond the Volga; Stalin ordered
that they should be concentrated in the frontier areas, where the Germans cap
tured them in the first few weeks. Stalin was responsible for another strategic
mistake: his military advisers told him that Hitler was likely to head straight for
Moscow, since his earlier campaigns had been won by making straight for the
capital of the country under attack. This would mean that the main German
thrust would be in the direction of Minsk and Smolensk. However, Stalin
believed that the south-west was the most likely area to attract Hitler so that he
could get his hands on Ukraine's wheat and the coal of the Donbass. The
defence plans were designed according to Stalin’s wishes; although all available
military intelligence suggested that the Germans were preparing to direct three-
quarters of their attacking forces towards Smolensk and Moscow, none of the
generals dared argue with Stalin, with the result that 25 Soviet divisions were
switched to the south-western front. This made the German advance easier: on
9 July they captured Minsk and on 16 July they began to surround the city of
Smolensk, half-way between Minsk and Moscow. In fairness, it has be said that
some preparations to meet an attack had been made, but they were the wrong
preparations.
(b) The USSR in retreat - June to December 1941

Some reports say that Stalin was so devastated by the invasion that he suffered
a nervous collapse and left it to Molotov to broadcast to the Soviet people, telling
them that the war had begun. The vast majority of ordinary people were stunned
by the news, since for nearly two years government propaganda had been telling
them about the great achievement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the power of the

Red Army. Stalin shut himself away in his dacha, and when Molotov and a group
of Politburo members went to see him to find out what to do next, he was afraid
they had come to arrest him. This was the perfect opportunity for them to get rid
of him, but nobody seems to have thought of that as a serious option; they evi
dently thought he was indispensable. Molotov proposed the formation of a small
group able to take quick decisions, and this idea was accepted. On 23 June a Main
Headquarters known as the Stavka (as in Tsarist days) was set up and Stalin
became chairman of the State Defence Committee. By early August he had taken
the title of Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and had replaced Timosh
enko as Commissar for Defence. He quickly pulled himself together sufficiently
to broadcast to the nation on 3 July. ‘Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters!
My friends,’ he began. ‘A grave threat hangs over our country; this war with
fascist Germany is not simply a war between two armies, but a total war of the
whole Soviet people against German-fascist forces. The goal of this great patri
otic war against the fascist oppressors is not only to liquidate the danger hanging
over our country, but to help all the peoples of Europe groaning under the yoke
of German fascism.' He went on to appeal to the people to form partisan units
behind the lines, to blow up bridges and roads, damage telephone and telegraph
lines, and set fire to forests, stores and transports. ‘The enemy and all his accom
plices must be hounded and annihilated at every step’ (Document D). According
to Volkogonov, the speech had a powerful effect, boosting people’s confidence in
Stalin and in the possibility of ultimate victory.16
The first five months of the war were one long disaster for the USSR. Time
after time Soviet troops were encircled by the Germans and forced to surrender.
The main invasion consisted of a three-pronged attack: Army Group North was
heading for Leningrad, Army Group Centre had Moscow as its target, and Army
Group South was aiming for Ukraine and ultimately the oilfields of the Caucasus.
The Germans were using a new type of warfare known as Blitzkrieg, which had
been spectacularly successful in the west. It involved air strikes to soften up
the enemy, followed by rapid tank and artillery attacks. The invasion on the
central front made the most rapid progress: on 27 June the Germans captured
Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, and eventually over 550,000 Soviet troops were
encircled in that area and forced to surrender. A month later the encirclement
of Smolensk was completed and a further 100,000 troops were taken prisoner.
By 1 September Leningrad was completely cut off from the rest of Russia, except
for the route across Lake Ladoga and the link by air, and the city began an
appalling 900-day siege in which over 800,000 of its citizens died from starv
ation, disease and German shelling. Meanwhile on the southern front Kiev,
capital of Ukraine, was captured on 16 September, and another 600,000 prisoners
were taken.
The Germans might have advanced even further if Hitler had not kept on
switching strategies. He and many of his generals suffered from over-confidence;
General Haider wrote in his diary as early as 3 July: ‘It is no exaggeration to say
that the campaign against Russia has been won in 14 days.' So confident was
Hitler that on 14 July he ordered a reduction in the number of troops on the east
ern front, and switched some divisions from the Moscow front to reinforce the
attacks on Leningrad and Kiev. Then Hitler changed his mind again and decided
290 Mastering Twentieth-Century fu^sian History

to concentrate on Moscow as the main target—it was vital that the capital should
be taken before winter set in, and a crucial couple of weeks had been lost. The
German advance on Moscow was resumed at the beginning of October, and the
Germans won another huge encircling victory, capturing the towns of Vyazma
and Bryansk and taking another 650,000 prisoners on 12 October. Hitler told the
German people that the Soviet enemy was now beaten and would never rise
again. In Moscow preparations began to evacuate the government to Kuibyshev,
600 miles south-eastwards on the Volga. By this time well over half of the total
number of Soviet troops at the beginning of the invasion had been killed or
captured, and most of the original aircraft and tanks had been destroyed. One
reason for the huge number of prisoners was Stalin’s refusal to allow his troops to
retreat to safety before the German encirclements were completed. Massive
areas of territory had fallen into German hands, containing about two fifths of
the population of the USSR and probably about half its industrial and agricul
tural assets. The capital itself seemed doomed as German forces penetrated to
within a hundred miles. General Zhukov, the most competent of Stalin’s military
leaders, was placed in charge of the defence of Moscow. He organized the build
ing of new fortifications; the work was done by hundreds of thousands of women
and children who dug anti-tank ditches and built tank traps and gun emplace
ments. Soviet troops resisted fanatically and the German advance began to slow
down. Fortunately the weather also came to the rescue - first there were heavy
snowfalls followed by bitter cold - it turned out to be the coldest winter in living
memory. By the end of November the advance had ground to a halt. Although
the Germans continued to make progress in the south, occupying the Crimea and
penetrating as far as the outskirts of Rostov-on-Don, both Leningrad and Moscow
held out until the end of the war.
Quite early in the campaign some Germans began to express surprise at how
fiercely the Russian soldiers were resisting. At the end of the first week General
Haider was writing in his diary: ‘Information from the front confirms that the
Russians are generally fighting to the last man,’ and the Nazi Party newspaper
was reporting that ‘the Russian soldier surpasses our adversary in the West in his
contempt for death. Endurance and fatalism make him hold out until he is blown
up with his trench, or falls in hand-to-hand fighting.’ By the middle of July dis
quiet and alarm began to creep into German accounts of unexpected Russian
counter-attacks. German soldiers had been repeatedly told that the average
Soviet soldier hated the harsh Stalinist system and would desert at the first
opportunity. It is true that the system was vastly unpopular both because of its
policies before the war and because of some of Stalin’s actions during the war.
For example, he ordered the NKVD to round up and deport groups of non-
Russians - including Kalmyks, Chechens and Crimean Tatars - whom he wrongly
suspected were traitors. Stalin caused more resentment among Soviet troops by
forbidding them to retreat, resulting in huge numbers being taken prisoner
unnecessarily. Lieutenant-General A.N. Vlasov, who had been captured in this
way by the Germans in 1942, was so incensed that he turned against Stalin and
agreed to form a Russian Liberation Army of Soviet prisoners-of-war. He hoped
to use it to overthrow Stalin first and then turn against the Nazis; but Hitler had
only permitted the army to be formed for propaganda purposes, and it was never

allowed to get anywhere near Moscow. However, the fact that so many Soviet
prisoners were willing to join Vlasov's army showed how widespread the hatred
of Stalin was.17Yet although there were a number of mass panics, desertions and
retreats in the early months of the invasion, these quickly dwindled.
One reason for the new tenacity of the Soviet troops was the increasingly strict
army discipline; NKVD agents were active within every army unit, reporting on
potential subversives and deserters, who were quickly dealt with; sometimes
they were shot in front of their assembled units; more often they were sent to
join penal regiments who were given the terrifying and deadly job of marching
out in front of their own tanks and armoured vehicles to clear away mines.
Much more important in stiffening the Soviet troops’ determination to fight was
the barbaric way in which the Germans treated the population in the occupied
territories. Many Soviet citizens were at first inclined to look on the approaching
Germans as liberators, but that was before they actually arrived. The Nazis
looked on the Slavs and the Jews as inferior and sub-human peoples, and set out
quite deliberately to exterminate as many of them as possible, along with
communists, gypsies and other unacceptable groups of people. In the words of
Hitler, ‘a Communist is not and can never be considered a fellow soldier. This
war will be a battle of annihilation; it will be very different from the war in the
West. In the East harshness will guarantee us a mild future.’ Goering told his
commanders in the east: T do not care if you say the people are dying of hunger.
So they may so long as not a single German dies of hunger.’ On 8 July Haider
noted in his diary: ‘Führer is firmly determined to level Moscow and Leningrad
to the ground, and to dispose of their populations, which otherwise we shall
have to feed during the winter. ’ \
The Germans set up Special Task Forces whose job was to move from town to
town and ‘liquidate’ Jews and other people suspected of resistance; systematic
reports and statistics were sent back to Berlin every week: 1150 Jews shot in
Dvinsk, 7000 Jews rounded up and shot in Lvov, 1460 in Lutsk, between 300 and
500 at Zolochew, and 3302 at Tilsit* When some German officers protested about
the killings, Hitler responded on 16 July: ‘The necessary rapid pacification of the
countryside can be attained only if every threat on the part of the hostile civil
population is ruthlessly taken care of. All pity and softness are evidence of weak
ness and constitute a danger.’ In every town and village the communist officials
were shot; at a village in Belorussia a group of 45 Jews was forced to dig a pit;
they were roped together and thrown into the pit alive. The SS (Schutzstaffel -
protection units) ordered a group of about 40 local Russians to shovel earth on
top of the Jews; the Russians refused, so the Germans opened fire with machine
guns and killed both the Jews and the Russians. By the end of July the numbers
of Nazi victims was rising steadily: at Kishinev in Bessarabia the SS indulged in
a two-week campaign of slaughter in which over 10,000 Jews were murdered. In
August and September German barbarism reached unspeakable depths; in just
two days at the end of September almost 34,000 Jews were murdered in a ravine
at Babi Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev in Ukraine (Document B); and almost 36,000
people described as Jews and Communists were killed in the cities of Nikolayev
and Kherson on the Black Sea. At Odessa at least 75,000 Jews were killed. Any
non-Jew who tried to hide or protect Jews in any way was unceremoniously shot
i '
along with the Jews and Commissars. No wonder the approach of the German
armies filled the Russian civilians with terror and inspired the Russian soldiers to
fight like dgers (Document C). It also inspired thousands of Russians to join the
partisans, who harassed the invaders in all sorts of ways with guerilla attacks,
scorched earth policies and raids on enemy lines of communication. Predictably
the Germans took ruthless reprisals - at least 50 Russians were to be shot for
every German killed by partisans. Any village suspected of housing or supplying
partisans would be burned down and its people shot. ‘This partisan war has its
advantages,’ remarked Hitler; ‘it gives us a chance to exterminate anyone who
turns against us.’ But there were always those who were prepared to collaborate
with the invader; in the Crimea some of the locals helped the Germans to murder
Jews, and at Babi Yar, Ukrainians helped to round up Jews to be marched to exe
cution. The Germans came to rely on informers who betrayed Jews and partisans
in return for bread or protection for their village.
Russian prisoners-of-war, estimated to number over three million by the end
of 1941, were also shamefully treated. The Nazis issued a directive that as com
munists, Soviet soldiers had forfeited every claim to be treated as an honourable
foe, and that therefore the most ruthless methods were justified in dealing with
them. Many of them were shot without any pretext, simply to reduce the num
bers needing to be fed. Others were starved, beaten, refused medical treatment
and denied adequate shelter and sanitation. Hundreds of thousands were forced
to march long distances to places where new camps were being set up. Anybody
who could not keep up, or who dropped from exhaustion, was shot. The Germans
opened a new prisoner-of-war camp near Minsk in which conditions were so
appalling that hundreds of Soviet soldiers were dying every day from starvation,
disease and brutal treatment at the hands of their guards. In August 600 Russian
prisoners were used at Auschwitz in experiments to test a new method of mass
killing - the gas chamber. The experiments proved satisfactory and the Nazis
soon adopted the gas chamber, using prussic acid (known as Zyclon-B), as the
normal method of mass murder in their extermination camps. A German report
dated 19 February 1942 reveals that almost three million of the four million
Russian prisoners taken up to that time had died. Unfortunately for the Russian
soldiers, their government had never signed the Geneva Convention which laid
down rules for the correct treatment of prisoners-of-war; this gave the Germans
the excuse to ignore it. Ironically, the more the German army and the SS became
committed to a war of annihilation, the more determined the Russians became
to resist them, and the more people joined the partisans.18
(c) The USSR fights back

‘If they want a war of extermination, they shall have one,’ declared Stalin in
a speech on 6 November 1941; the following day, the anniversary of the October
Revolution, the traditional military parade went ahead as usual in Red Square.
Stalin himself reviewed his troops and delivered a stirring speech invoking
Russian nationalism and the heroic military leaders of the past. With the
Germans less than fifty miles away, it was a defiant gesture; as John Erickson puts
it: ‘His words were meant first to steady and then to stimulate Russian nerves, his

phrases were at once defiant and gloomy, but he hammered on the conscious
ness of Russian achievement and historical self-respect. He gave notice that the
Untermensch intended to fight back/19Work had started many weeks before on
moving armaments factories and other industrial plants from the threatened
areas to cities such as Magnitogorsk in the Urals, and Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk
and Kurgan in Siberia, east of the Ural Mountains. Since early July the Red Army
had been carrying out a scorched earth policy; as they withdrew from an area
they took with them everything movable that could be of use to the enemy -
trucks, locomotives, rolling stock, fuel, food and cattle; anything that could not
be moved had to be destroyed. The numbers of partisan units grew rapidly in all
areas captured by the Germans until by the middle of 1942 they included some
where in the region of 700,000 men. Both the Red Army and the partisans were
helped by information about German positions and plans passed on to them by
the British, who in July 1941 had broken the Enigma code which the German
army used to direct its campaigns on the eastern front. In September large
quantities of war materials supplied by Britain and the USA began to arrive in
Archangelsk; they included tanks, anti-tank guns, fighter aircraft, lorries, barbed
wire, copper, aluminium, rubber, soldiers’ overcoats and boots, and medical
supplies.
The first achievement of the Soviet fight-back was the recapture of Rostov-
on-Don on 28 November, which the Germans had only succeeded in holding for
one week. This was the first German reverse and it gave a great boost to Russian
morale. Next came the successful defence of Moscow in November and December
1941. The German commander, von Bock, was trying to .carry out the classic
encircling movement with his Panzer divisions, but Zhukov had prepared the
defences well and German progress was slow. The fighting was heavy and by the
end of November, although the advance had been halted, the German pincers
had edged around to the north and south of Moscow; the most forward German
troops were only 20 miles from the Kremlin. By this time the weather was bitterly
cold with temperatures of -20 °C ànd deep snow. The wheels of the Panzers froze
solid and it was too cold for the lubricating oil to work. The Germans, who lacked
proper winter clothing, began to suffer from frostbite. Meanwhile Russian re
inforcements were arriving, some of them from the Far East on the Mongolian
front. Stalin had decided that it was safe to withdraw them, after he had received
information from Richard Sorge, the Soviet spy based in Tokyo, that the Japanese
intended to attack south-east Asia rather than the USSR. The Soviet leaders had
learned lessons from the failures of the winter war against Finland. These Siber
ian troops were vastly experienced in winter conditions and the Red Army as
a whole was now better equipped, padded and furred, to cope with intense cold.
On 5 December Zhukov launched a series of Soviet counter-attacks with 700,000
troops along a 500-mile front. Fierce blizzards were raging and in some places
the snow was waist high; the Germans were gradually pushed back, and as they
retreated they were attacked by Soviet ski-troops. By the end of February the
Germans had fallen back by as much as 100 miles along the front; pressure on
Moscow was relieved and the city was not threatened again. It was a tremendous
psychological victory for the Soviet forces; this was the first large-scale German
military reverse of the war. They lost around half a million men and thousands of
i v
guns and tanks; their troops had suffered terribly, since in the intense cold even
a relatively minor wound could lead to severe shock and death. In one day alone
at the end of December, more than 14,000 German soldiers were forced to undergo
amputations because of frostbite; a further 62,000 were suffering from frostbite,
which did not require amputation, but was serious enough to prevent them
taking any further part in the fighting. Hitler removed the three main generals -
von Leeb, von Bock and von Runstedt - and made himself Commander-in-Chief
on the Eastern Front.
Early in 1942 the activities of Soviet partisans began to cause the Germans
serious difficulties in most of the occupied areas. On 20 February a German officer
reported that ‘the area east of the Dnieper is infested with well-armed partisans
under unified command. The roads are heavily mined. The whole male popula
tion is being recruited and is trained in special training areas. It would appear
that the partisans are constantly reinforced by airborne troops.' They were well
armed with machine guns and anti-tank guns. All these partisan groups had
become expert at disrupting the movement of German troops and supplies, and
it was beginning to tell on German morale. In March 1942 the Germans launched
Operation Munich, striking at partisan bases in the Minsk and Smolensk areas.
Their treatment of the local civilian population was brutal in the extreme: villages
were set on fire and their inhabitants shot; but the only achievement of these
tactics was to strengthen the resolve of the partisans and their local supporters.
The success of the partisans and the victory outside Moscow encouraged Stalin,
against the advice of his generals, to attempt three more offensives: one in the
north to try and lift the siege of Leningrad, one in Ukraine to recapture Kharkov,
and one aimed at Kerch in the Crimea. But all three were premature and not one
of them was successful; the Red Army lost a further half a million men - a personal
failure for Stalin, who had insisted on the offensives (Document F). The best that
could be said for them was that they at least delayed the next German offensive.
The German forces were also very much reduced by this time, but Hitler hoped
to make up for this by holding their positions in the north and centre while
launching the main offensive on the southern front. For the time being, Moscow
was to be spared any further assault.
Hitler intended his next strike to begin in May, and it was to be directed
towards capturing Stalingrad and recapturing Rostov-on-Don, which they had
held for a week in November 1941. The Germans would then advance into the
rich oil-producing region of the Caucasus as far as the Caspian Sea. But Hitler
made two crucial changes of plan: he had come to the conclusion that Russian
resistance was crumbling, so he decided to strike at Rostov without waiting until
the capture of Stalingrad was completed. The attack on Rostov began on 23 lune,
but the city was not taken until 23 July. Most military historians agree that this
four-week delay was vital: if Hitler had concentrated on Stalingrad in early July,
the city could probably have been captured quite easily. Stalin also made a mis
take which could have proved fatal; he believed that the Germans would concen
trate their spring offensive against Moscow, and reinforcements were sent to that
front. When it became clear that the main German offensive was being launched
in the south, Stalin and his generals had to do some rapid reorganization of their
fronts and rush more troops to the Stalingrad area. Stalin was learning from his

mistakes in other ways too: at Rostov-on-Don the Germans were expecting to
encircle the Soviet troops and take the usual huge numbers of prisoners, but
Stalin allowed his forces to withdraw; the majority escaped and survived to fight
another day.
After the capture of Rostov Hitler issued his orders for the next move: the capture
of the eastern Black Sea coast all the way down to Batum on the frontier with
Turkey, and the seizure of the oil-wells at Maikop, Grozny and Baku. Further to
the north, Stalingrad on the River Volga still had to be taken. But this was the
second of Hitler’s miscalculations; Stalingrad was still vulnerable, and a concer
ted attack would have had an excellent chance of success. However, when Rostov
fell, Hitler became even more confident that the Russians were finished, and he
decided to spread his forces out. Without waiting for Stalingrad to be captured,
he split the German forces into three: Army Group A was to advance round the
Black Sea coast and aim for Batum; part of Army Group B was to head straight for
the oilfields at Maikop, Grozny and Baku; and the remainder of Army Group B
was ordered to capture Stalingrad. At first the Germans advanced rapidly through
the Caucasus, capturing Maikop and Stavropol in August; but in September, as
Soviet resistance stiffened and more reinforcements arrived, the invaders ground
to a halt about 35 miles from Grozny. Some of the German troops were diverted
to reinforce the attack on Stalingrad, and Grozny was never captured. Field
Marshal List, the German commander in the Caucasus, was sacked by Hitler for
failing to reach the Caspian Sea coast. All attention was now focused on Stalin
grad where a titanic struggle was developing. Hitler was determined to capture
the city and had ordered that when it was eventually taken, the entire male popu
lation was to be eliminated. Stalin was totally obsessed with his commitment to
save the city which bore his name.
(d) Stalingrad - August 1942 to January 1943

Stalingrad was in a pivotal position on the frontier between European to d Asian
Russia; it was also a vital communications centre both by rail and by river.
It stretched for some twenty miles along the west bank of the River Volga which
flowed southwards into the Caspian Sea at Astrakhan. It was a university city and
also an important industrial and commercial centre, a symbol of Soviet achieve
ment; there were tall white apartment buildings and beautiful gardens all along
the high west bank of the river. There were still around 600,000 people in the city,
since Stalin had forbidden any evacuation across the Volga, in case it led to panic.
Already at the end of July Stalin had issued his famous Order No. 227, which
became known as ‘Not One More Step Backwards’ (Document G). ‘Panic-mongers
and cowards must be destroyed on the spot. The retreat mentality must be deci
sively eliminated.' Commanders who allowed their troops to abandon positions
were to be removed and sent for immediate trial. Each army had to organize
‘three to five well-armed detachments (up to 200 men each)’ who would form
a second line; their orders were to shoot any soldier who attempted to run away.
Zhukov carried out this order using tanks manned by specially selected officers;
they followed up each attack and opened fire on any soldiers who hung back or
tried to retreat
296 Mastering Twentieth-Century hi^sian History

The German Sixth Army, commanded by General von Paulus, began their great
push towards Stalingrad on 21 August, crossing the River Don some 80 miles
west of the city. Two days later the Luftwaffe carried out a massive air-raid on
Stalingrad with up to a thousand bombers. Incendiary bombs completely
destroyed most of the wooden houses in the south-west of the city, and the huge
petroleum-storage tanks on the river bank were hit, sending a ball of flame
15,000 feet into the sky. People crowded into the cellars as the city became an
inferno, but 40,000 were killed. In the late afternoon the first of the Germans
reached the Volga just north of the city, while another army was closing in from
the south-west. Stalin appointed General Vassily Chuikov to take charge of the
city's defence and its 40,000 defending troops. Tough and blunt, he told Khrush
chev, who was the leading political commissar in the city: ‘We will defend the city
or die in the attempt... Time is blood.' His first achievement was to stiffen the
nerve of his army commanders who were beginning to waver; NKVD troops were
placed in charge of every landing stage and jetty on the west bank with orders to
shoot anybody, whatever their rank, who attempted to escape across the river to
the east bank. There was nowhere for the soldiers to go and nothing they could
do except fight the Germans; and this they did with increasing ferocity. The
Russian forces included women, many of whom operated anti-aircraft batteries.
Try as they might, the Germans failed to make a breakthrough into the city.
On 12 and 13 September the Germans launched a terrific onslaught by air and
on the ground. One Russian corporal wrote: ‘A mass of Stukas came over us, and
after their attack, one could not believe that even a mouse was left alive.' The
main part of the city was now completely destroyed, and the streets were blocked
with bumt-out vehicles and fallen masonry. Gradually the Germans forced their
way in and began to take over the city block by block. In some places they man
aged to push through to the Volga, splitting Chuikov's forces. Still the defenders
held on, all the time being squeezed into a narrowing strip along the river bank.
The Germans now began to suffer the results of their own devastating bombing;
it was extremely difficult to make progress through the ruined city - the streets
were almost impassable and the empty shells of buildings provided the perfect
cover for the defending Russians. There was fierce hand-to-hand fighting as each
block and each building was fought over. The main railway station changed
hands fifteen times in five days, but it was eventually held by the Germans. This
was not what the German soldiers had been led to expect; as Antony Beevor
explains, ‘they found artillery fire far more frightening in the city. Whenever a tall
building was hit, shrapnel and masonry showered from above... there was the
danger of snipers in tall buildings... noise assailed their nerves constantly...
They loathed house-to-house fighting. They found such close-quarter combat,
which broke conventional military boundaries and dimensions, psychologically
disorientating.'20 One of the most famous incidents in the battle was the defence
of ‘Pavlov’s house’. At the end of September Sergeant Jakob Pavlov of the Soviet
42nd Guards Regiment and about 60 men seized a large four-storey building on
the comer of a square, only about 300 yards from the river. They had plenty of
mortars, heavy machine guns and anti-tank guns, and they succeeded in holding
off tanks and Panzers for 58 days, in spite of artillery, mortar fire and bombing.
By mid-November Chuikov held only a narrow strip of land less than a thousand

yards deep along the river bank; but both sides had fought each other to a stand
still; the Germans were completely exhausted and von Paulus decided to break
off the attack for the time being.
In the meantime Generals Zhukov and Vasilevsky were planning an ambitious
counter-attack, known as Operation Uranus, on the same lines as the earlier
German encircling tactics. Stalin was at first critical of the plan, but eventually
approved it; he was beginning to learn to trust the experts. Huge reinforcements
were assembled consisting of 12 armies, and the plan was to surround the entire
German forces besieging Stalingrad. After some delays because of bad weather,
the Soviet forces were ready; on 19 November just over one million men in three
army groups swept round from the north-east, behind the German Sixth Army,
and within five days it was completely encircled. Between 250,000 and 300,000
German troops were trapped in and around Stalingrad. Von Paulus asked Hitler
for permission to break out while there was still time, but Hitler refused. ‘We are
not budging from the Volga/ he told von Paulus. The Luftwaffe would keep
the troops supplied until a relieving army commanded by von Manstein arrived.
He had been hurriedly recalled from the Leningrad front; he was ordered to form
a new army group, take it to Stalingrad and break through the Soviet ring from
the outside. Hitler had clearly learned nothing from the earlier events on the
eastern front, and this plan was completely unrealistic. The Luftwaffe did not have
sufficient transport planes at its disposal to deliver even the minimum supplies
that von Paulus needed, even in perfect weather conditions. But the winter
weather was predictably bad - ice and fog were the main problems for aircraft -
and the Soviet anti-aircraft defences became more effective. As for von Man-
stein’s relief army, it too was in danger of being encircled, the closer it advanced
towards Stalingrad. At the end of December it was itself attacked by yet another
Soviet army and brought to a halt well short of the city. Von Manstein urged
Hitler to allow von Paulus to try and break out of Stalingrad while he still had
enough fuel, but Hitler again refused. ‘The Sixth Army must stand f^st, even if
I cannot lift the siege until the spring; retreat would sacrifice the whole meaning
of the campaign.’
However, the end was fast approaching for von Paulus. His troops were
running short of food, ammunition, fuel and medical supplies, and were forced
to eat their horses - 39,000 were consumed before the Germans surrendered.
On 9 January General Rokossovsky, who had been given the job of finishing off
the operation, sent two envoys to call on von Paulus to surrender. When he
refused, Rokossovsky launched a devastating artillery barrage, killing thousands
of Germans. The surviving troops were in a terrible state, starving, exhausted,
and suffering from frostbite and various ailments, mainly dysentery and jaundice.
Von Paulus informed Hitler that further resistance was impossible but again
Hitler refused to hear of surrender. German soldiers, he told von Paulus, were
required to fight to the death; he wanted a heroic example for the German people.
He promoted von Paulus to Field Marshal, since no German Field Marshal had
ever surrendered. By 26 January large numbers of senior officers were giving
themselves up, and some were committing suicide. However, von Paulus, who
was suffering from dysentery, is said to have remarked: T have no intention of
shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal’ On 31 January 1943 he surrendered
i v
what was left of the once formidable German Sixth Army; 91,000 German soldiers
were taken prisoner and 50,000 of them died during the next few weeks in the
prison camps. During the battle over 150,000 Germans had been killed.
The Battle of Stalingrad was the great turning-point of the war on the eastern
front. For the first time the Germans had not only been checked, they had been
decisively defeated. This came as a stunning shock to the German people, and
many began to have doubts about Hitler and the chances of ultimate victory.
Russian losses had been even heavier: in the entire Stalingrad campaign the Red
Army had lost almost half a million men killed and about 600,000 seriously
wounded. But in spite of the losses, it was the first great Soviet victory of the war.
The Kremlin bells were rung to announce the surrender of von Paulus, and Stalin
was hailed as ‘the wise leader and the great architect of victory/ For the Russians
it was a wonderful confidence-booster; their generals had shown themselves
capable of learning successfully from the Germans. Stalingrad was not decisive:
the Russians had shown their superiority to the Germans in winter conditions,
but it still remained to be seen whether the Germans could be defeated in sum
mer conditions when they were at their most effective. However, Stalingrad did
mean that for the first time the Soviet leaders could begin to think realistically
about the possibility of ultimate victory. The German defeat was a great encour
agement too for Russia’s allies, Britain and the USA, and for the peoples of
occupied Europe and their anti-German resistance movements.
(e) The siege of Leningrad

When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941 Leningrad was in
immediate danger of attack from the south-west by the Germans, and from the
north by the Finns, who declared war on the USSR on 26 June. Thousands of
civilians were set to work digging anti-tank ditches and building concrete gun-
emplacements; factories, especially those producing armaments, were evacu
ated further eastwards and so were many of the most precious art treasures from
the Hermitage. On 20 August the Germans reached Gatchina, only 25 miles from
Leningrad, and the following day they were able to block the railway line from
Leningrad to Moscow. Soon afterwards Finnish forces, advancing from the
north, recaptured Terioki which they had been forced to hand over to the USSR
in 1940; east of Lake Ladoga, more Finnish troops pushed towards the other great
northern lake, Lake Onega. By early September all road and rail links with the rest
of the country had been severed, although the airfield was still in Russian hands,
and there was the route across Lake Ladoga. The siege had begun, and almost
three million civilians were trapped inside the city.
The Russians threw everything into the defence of Leningrad. There were 30
Soviet divisions in the city attempting to beat off the invaders. Guns were
brought from the Kronstadt battleships and mounted on land, and even the guns
from the old cruiser Aurora were brought and positioned on the Pulkovo heights
to the south-west of the city, facing the advancing Germans. But the noose was
closing more tightly; on 8 September the Germans carried out their first air-raid,
dropping some six thousand incendiary bombs. Among the buildings destroyed
was a large warehouse complex containing hundreds of tons of food supplies

Figure 7.2 The siege o f Leningrad - women mourn the shrouded corpse o fa 'th ild who
has died from starvation.
intended to see the Leningraders through the winter. In spite of the continued
bombing the outer defence line held, and on 12 September Hitler made one of
his notorious changes of plan. He decided that it was more important to capture
Moscow first, so he switched several tank and motorized divisions from the Len
ingrad front to Moscow, and announced that Leningrad would be starved into
surrender. But this did not mean any slackening of the air attacks; on 19 Septem
ber almost 300 German bombers launched a terrifying raid, killing over a thou
sand people and destroying one of the city’s hospitals. One of the few bright
spots at this time was that during September, October and November, Soviet
transport planes succeeded in flying in thousands of tons of armaments, ammu
nition and food. Stalin was furious with his old friend Voroshilov, the military
commander, and Zhdanov, the party boss in Leningrad, who began to talk
about giving up the city. Stalin angrily dismissed any such suggestions, calling
Voroshilov and Zhdanov ‘specialists in retreat.' He appointed Marshal Zhukov
to take over the defence of Leningrad, and he too flew in during September.
I V
300 Mastering Twentieth-Century Ri&sian History

Like Stalingrad, Leningrad took on symbolic importance: it was the cradle of the
Revolution and Communism, and Stalin was determined that German soldiers
should never set foot on its streets. And they never did, except as prisoners-of-war
in July 1942 several thousand of them were paraded along the Nevsky Prospekt in
order to boost civilian morale.
For the civilians trapped in Leningrad it was a nightmarish experience; the first
winter of the siege was one of the coldest in living memory, and there was no elec
tricity and very little fuel to keep people warm. As the food supplies slowly dwin
dled, people began to die of starvation; by the end of 1941 between three and four
thousand people were dying every day (Document E). On Christmas day 1941
some 3700 people died of starvation and related diseases; in January and February
1942 a total of at least 200,000 succumbed. Pavel Luknitsky, a writer and war
correspondent, wrote in his diary on 29 December: 'To take someone who has died
to the cemetery is an affair so laborious that it exhausts the last vestiges of strength
in the survivors, and the living, fulfilling their duty to the dead, are brought to the
brink of death themselves.' He went on to describe the deathly quiet of the city;
there were no cars moving about the streets, only frail people pulling sledges
which often carried a corpse wrapped in a sheet. When they arrived at the cemeter
ies the ground was frozen like iron, too solid for them to dig a grave. The body was
just dumped, and sometimes those who pulled the sledge fell beside the corpse,
themselves dead, without a sound, without a groan, without a cry. The corpses lay
on the surface and were gradually covered by snow and ice.21 Most people were
forced to eat their dogs and cats and there were many cases of cannibalism.
During February 1942 the situation began to look slightly better with the
improvement of the ice road across the frozen Lake Ladoga. When it first became
passable in December 1941 it did not work well - the link from Leningrad to the
lake side was slow and the organization of the road was chaotic. By the end of
January the teams of trucks which travelled almost non-stop along the road were
actually bringing food into Leningrad faster than it was being eaten. This was
partly because of the large number of people who were dying but also because
Zhdanov decided to evacuate 500,000 people, about a quarter of the surviving
population. This target was achieved: between 22 January and 15 April 1942 over
550,000 people were moved from Leningrad and across the lake in buses, while
in the opposite direction came food, fuel and arms and ammunition. It seemed
that the worst horrors might be over and as the spring came the survivors came
out and set to work to clean up the city and bury the dead. On 15 April 1942, the
248th day of the siege, the trams ran again for the first time in months. On the
other hand the ice road was rapidly becoming impassable and the Road of Life,
as it had become known, was severed until the following winter. People con
tinued to die of starvation during the summer, although in much smaller numbers.
Zhdanov tried to boost morale in all sorts of ways: in July German prisoners were
paraded; and on 9 August there was a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's 7th
Symphony, his latest work, which he had dedicated to Leningrad. Shostakovich
had been in the city when the siege began, and had completed the first three
movements there when in October 1941 the government ordered him to leave.
He was evacuated to Moscow and later to Kuibyshev, where the first performance
of the completed symphony took place. In June 1942 the score was flown into

Leningrad; the performance of the Leningrad Symphony in the Philharmonic
Hall was qn incredibly emotional occasion; it was broadcast all over the USSR
and on shortwave to Europe and the USA, and in the background could be heard
the sound of heavy guns.
Between August and October 1942 Soviet forces tried four times without success
to break out and lift the blockade. But at least they inflicted heavy casualties on
von Manstein’s army; when von Manstein himself was later sent to Stalingrad it
was clear that there would be no further German attempt to take Leningrad in
1942. In January 1943 the Russians at last succeeded in capturing Schusselburg,
making the first breach in the blockade. Many people in the city thought the
siege would soon be over, especially after the news reached them of the surren
der of von Paulus at Stalingrad. But they were soon bitterly disappointed: the
capture of Schusselburg had opened up only a narrow corridor through which
the railway ran; at one point the German guns were only 500 yards away; journeys
were hazardous and casualties high. Nevertheless ‘the corridor of death’ as it
soon became known, proved to be a life-saver - during the rest of 1943 some 4.5
million tons of supplies were brought through into the city, and the daily food
ration was gradually increased. But the problems were not over; all through the
summer of 1943 the Germans continued to shell the city, and it was not until 15
January 1944 that the iron ring was broken and the siege finally raised. In the
words of Harrison Salisbury: ‘Nothing can diminish the achievement of the men
and women who fought on despite hunger, cold, disease, bombs, shells, lack of heat
or transportation in a city which seemed given over to death. The story of those
days is an epic which will stir human hearts as long as mankind exists on earth.’22
(f) The Germans in retreat - the end of the war

After Stalingrad the Red Army was elated and full of confidence; they pushed
rapidly westwards and by mid-February 1943 had captured Kursk and Kharkov.
But the German forces were not about to fall apart without a desperate fight.
They succeeded in stabilizing their line and threw the Soviets back, recapturing
Kharkov on 14 March. On 5 July Hitler began his attempt to recapture Kursk by
attacking the great westward salient around the city. He sent a personal message
to his troops: ‘This day,’ he told them, ‘you are to take part in an offensive of such
importance that the whole future of the war may depend on its outcome. More
than anything else, your victory will show the whole world that resistance to the
power of the German Army is hopeless.’23The Russians had been warned what to
expect by a captured German sapper, and about two hours before the offensive
was due to begin they directed a great artillery bombardment on the German
forming-up positions. This inflicted considerable damage and put paid to German
hopes of taking the Russians by surprise. The battle at Kursk lasted almost two
weeks and developed into the biggest tank battle so far in military history. John
Erickson describes it vividly: ‘these were tank armadas on the move, coming on
in great squadrons of 100 or 200 machines or more... Now that Soviet tank ar
mies were moving up into the main defensive fields, almost 4000 Soviet tanks and
nearly 3000 German tanks and assault guns were steadily drawn into this gigantic
battle, which roared on hour after hour leaving ever greater heaps of the dead
*v
and dying, clumps of blazing or disabled armour, shattered personnel carriers
and lorries, and thickening columns of smoke coiling over the steppe. With each
hour also, the traffic in mangled, twisted men brought to steaming, blood-soaked
forward dressing stations continued to swell.* 24The climactic engagement of the
battle took place near the village of Prokhorovka on 12 July, when two rival
armies of about 900 tanks each engaged each other. At the end of the day the
Germans had lost over 300 tanks including 70 out of 100 of their superior ‘Tigers’.
The Soviets had lost even more, but the important thing was that the German at
tack had been held. The same day the Soviets also launched an attack on Orel,
north of Kursk, just in case the Germans were thinking of sending reinforcements
from Orel to Kursk. This amazed and dismayed the Germans, showing as it did
the increasing confidence of the Soviet forces and their willingness to take tactical
initiatives.
When Marshal Zhukov began a counter-attack, the Germans soon began to
withdraw from the Kursk salient (16 July). Their retreat was certainly not a rout,
but it was steady and consistent - Kharkov was liberated again on 23 August,
Smolensk on 25 September and Kiev on 6 November. In the meantime Hitler had
lost his ally Mussolini, who was overthrown towards the end of July; to make
matters worse for the Germans, Italy eventually changed sides. After the siege of
Leningrad was broken in January 1944, ultimate Soviet victory was assured.
Some German troops had been withdrawn from the Russian front to try and
stabilize the situation in Italy. In May 1944 the Russians at last succeeded in driv
ing the Germans out of the Crimea. On 22 June - the third anniversary of Hitler’s
invasion - Stalin opened his summer offensive, Operation Bagration, along a
200-mile front around the Baltic and into Belorussia; this was the ideal follow-up
to the successful British and American invasion of Normandy on 6 June. The
Germans were under increasing pressure from both directions, making it very
difficult for Hitler to switch troops from one front to the other. The Soviet forces
massed in the east for Operation Bagration were awesome - 1.7 million troops,
2700 tanks, 24,000 pieces of artillery, 2300 rocket launchers, 6000 aircraft and
70,000 lorries. The Germans were overwhelmed; in the first week their entire
front was broken; 38,000 soldiers were killed and over 100,000 taken prisoner.
The Russians advanced rapidly - by the middle of July they had inflicted a stun
ning defeat on the German Army Group Centre which lost 350,000 men killed or
taken prisoner. German defeats were now assuming similar proportions to those
suffered by the Russians during the first few months of the war; by 1August Soviet
forces had liberated Lublin and Lvov and had reached the suburbs of Warsaw,
where they halted. A few days earlier they had come upon the German concen
tration camp at Majdanek, near Lublin, where they found hundreds of unburied
corpses and seven gas chambers. This was the first of the Nazi death camps to be
discovered by allied forces; photographs of the corpses were the first to reveal to
the rest of the world the unspeakable horrors of the concentration and exter
mination camps. It later emerged that over 1.5 million people had been murdered
at Majdanek, including Jews, many Soviet prisoners of war and Poles who had
opposed the German occupation.
As the Red Army began to move further into Poland, the question of the coun
try’s political future arose. Naturally Stalin wanted a Polish government which

would be, ideally, communist and friendly to the USSR; Britain and the USA
wanted a Polish government which was democratic and non-communist. They
had no intention of allowing communism to spread across Europe, filling the
vacuum left by the destruction of fascism. Inevitably tensions increased among
the allies. There was already in existence a Polish govemment-in-exile based in
London which was anti-Stalin and anti-communist. It controlled Polish parti
sans and resistance fighters who were organized into the Polish Home Army.
However, Stalin announced that a Polish Committee of National Liberation had
been formed which would become a pro-Soviet Polish government when the
country was liberated. He would have nothing to do with the govemment-in-
exile and refused to recognize the Home Army; as Soviet troops occupied Poland,
they began to organize regular forces who were equipped and controlled by the
Red Army. On 22 July Stalin set up the Polish Committee of National Liberation
in Lublin to form what he called ‘the core of a provisional Polish government
made up of democratic forces.’ But it was obvious that a ‘liberated’ Poland was
going to be under close Russian supervision.
This left the Polish govemment-in-exile in a very difficult situation; their only
alternative, apart from doing nothing at all and allowing Stalin to have his way,
was to bring about an uprising in Warsaw, drive the Germans out and take
control of the capital themselves before the Russians arrived. Hoping that the
approach of the Soviet forces would throw the Germans into a panic and cause
them to abandon the city, the local Home Army leaders decided to attack the
German forces in Warsaw on 1 August 1944. They had about 150,000 men but
they were poorly trained and short of weapons. Nevertheless the Germans were
caught off guard and within the first week the Poles succeeded in taking over
most of the city on the left bank of the River Vistula. Unfortunately they failed to
capture three vital targets: the airport, the bridges over the Vistula and the
suburb of Praga on the right bank. The Germans, who were in retreat almost
everywhere else, decided to make a stand in Warsaw and crush the rising. ‘Des
troy tens of thousands,’ Himmler ordered the general in charge. Reinforcements
were brought in, and although the Poles fought bravely and held out for over two
months, in the end they were savagely crushed; they surrendered officially on
2 October. Himmler’s orders were brutally carried out by SS troops; even the
patients in the city’s main hospital were lined up and shot dead; other hospitals
were set on fire; wounded Poles were drenched with petrol and burnt alive, and
poisoned gas was used to kill hundreds of people who were trying to escape
through the sewers. It was calculated that about 300,000 Polish civilians were
killed, over half a million were sent to concentration camps, and another 150,000
were deported to forced labour camps in Germany. When everybody had been
removed, the Germans blew up what remained of the city.
One of the most controversial aspects of the Warsaw uprising was that the Poles
received no effective help from the allies. The British and Americans did what
they could to fly in urgently needed arms and ammunition from their nearest
bases in southern Italy, but Stalin refused to allow them to land on Soviet air
fields, and supplies therefore had to be dropped by parachute. The allied losses
in aircraft and pilots were high, and a large proportion of the supplies fell into
German hands. Stalin himself sent no material help, and although Rokossovsky’s
*'
army was only a few miles away across the Vistula, he made no move against the
Germans until 5 September. But by then it was almost too late - the insurgents
were being squeezed into an ever-dwindling area in the city centre. Western
historians were critical of Stalin, suggesting that the Red Army deliberately sat on
the other side of the river and allowed Warsaw to be destroyed. Stalin himself
gave several explanations for this inaction: he claimed that the uprising was
a 'reckless adventure’ launched by a group of criminals who wanted to seize
power for themselves. He said that the Soviet troops were exhausted and that the
unexpected German counter-attack on the Vistula and the concentration of
German forces made it necessary for Rokossovsky to pause and regroup his
army. Stalin claimed that they had hoped to take Warsaw on 6 August but the
Germans had forced them back on the defensive. The Germans had certainly
inflicted severe damage on the leading Soviet tank corps, which had been forced
to withdraw for refitting. When the Soviets, helped by two Polish divisions, did
eventually start to move again on 5 September it took them over a week of fierce
fighting to capture the suburb of Praga. Although some of the Polish troops
managed to cross the river into the main part of Warsaw, it was too late - the
insurgents were on the point of annihilation and the Polish troops were soon
driven back onto the east bank. It also needs to be remembered, as Richard
Overy points out, that ‘the Warsaw rising was instigated not to help out the Soviet
advance but to forestall it Polish Nationalists did not want Warsaw liberated by
the Red Army but wanted to do so themselves, as a symbol of the liberation
struggle and the future independence of Poland.’25 Stalin had used the rising
cleverly to his own advantage; it seems fairly certain that his real motive was to
allow the Germans to destroy the non-communist Poles, who would have resisted
any Soviet attempts at domination. This the Germans did with savage efficiency,
making it relatively easy for Stalin to establish his Soviet-sponsored Polish Com
mittee of National Liberation once Warsaw was taken by the Russians (17 January
1945). At the same time Stalin had done just enough to enable him to claim that
he had not simply abandoned the Poles to their fate; a breach with the West was
avoided and the alliance of the Big Three - the USSR, the USA and Britain con
tinued, for the time being.26
Although the Germans had succeeded in crushing the Warsaw rising by the
beginning of October, Hitler had reached the point where he was drawing on his
last reserves of men and war materials. It was vital therefore that he should make
the best possible use of his resources, and that meant on the eastern front to stop
the massive Soviet attack which was being prepared against Germany itself.
However, against the advice of all his generals Hitler insisted on launching an
attack in the west on 16 December 1944 through the Ardennes towards Antwerp.
This was a pointless exercise at that stage of the war and made the job of the Red
Army considerably easier. Although the Germans made some initial advances, by
16 January 1945 the Americans had been able to push them back to the original
line; the Germans had lost 100,000 men killed or wounded, 600 tanks and 1600
aircraft with nothing to show for it. In the east the Soviet forces were massed
along a front stretching some 350 miles. The Soviet generals Zhukov and Koniev
opened their attack in January a few days before the final failure of Hitler’s
Ardennes offensive. They were brilliantly successful and by 3 February had

reached the River Oder; some of the Soviet troops were only about 50 miles from
Berlin. However, while the Yalta Conference was in session (4-11 February) Stalin
slowed down the advance, and there was fierce German resistance. It was not
until 16 April that the Red Army began its final great offensive - the push to take
Berlin; 2.5 million troops moved towards the capital where Hitler was now
spending most of his time in his underground bunker. The battle for Berlin was
ferocious - the Red Army lost about 300,000 men killed and the Germans some
200,000 before the Soviets at last forced their way into the city on 21 April; Hitler
shot himself on 30 April and that same evening a Russian soldier raised the Red
Victory Banner on top of the Reichstag. General Chuikov, the heroic defender of
Stalingrad, accepted the surrender of Berlin on 2 May; all remaining German
forces surrendered unconditionally on 5 May. Stalin was pleased that the Ameri
cans and British had made no attempt to capture Berlin first. The war in Europe
was over, but Japan still had to be defeated. Stalin’s main concern was that Japan
should not be exclusively under American control. Although the Japanese were
on the point of surrender after the Americans had dropped atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (6 and 9 August 1945), Stalin insisted on declaring war
on Japan, and the Red Army invaded Manchuria. When the Japanese signed an
unconditional surrender on 2 September, he could claim to have played a part in
their defeat. Stalin was at the pinnacle of his power and achievement. Fascism
had been defeated, largely thanks to the efforts of the USSR, which had worn the
Germans down; peace had been restored and the USSR was one of the three
most powerful nations in the world.
(g) How was the Soviet victory made possible?

In the late summer of 1941, with triumphant German forces at the gates of
Moscow and Leningrad, there cannot have been many people who expected
Stalin and the USSR to survive much longer. After only three months qf war the
Red Army had lost two million men killed, well over two million taken prisoner,
and almost all their tanks and aircraft had been destroyed. Yet only just over
three years later the situation had been reversed, the Red Army had crossed the
River Oder into Germany, and it was Hitler and his Fascist system which were on
the verge of annihilation. It was an almost unbelievable transformation, perhaps
the greatest reversal in military history. The Russians were fortunate that Hitler
squandered much of his advantage by refusing to listen to the advice of his
generals. The Germans had several fronts to think about - after November 1942
things became more difficult for them: they had to send troops to North Africa to
help the Italians out and more troops had to be kept in France in case the Allies
launched their ‘second front'. The Russians were fortunate that they had vast
human resources to call upon, and millions of new recruits were called up and
hurriedly given some training. Thousands of officers who had been convicted as
‘spies’ in the purges before the war were brought out of their labour camps and
recommissioned. But sheer numbers would not have been enough if tactics had
not changed. One of the key reasons for the eventual Soviet success was that
their military leaders - particularly Generals Shaposhnikov, Zhukov, Vasilevsky
and Rokossovsky - were willipg to learn from the Germans. They examined

closely the Germans’ techniques - massed air power, tank and motorized divi
sions used in rapid encircling movements - and they began to reorganize the Red
Army so that it could attempt similar tactics. New tank armies were formed
supported by mobile infantry, which were the equivalent of the Germern Panzer
divisions. Each tank army was a self-sufficient striking force, with its own artil
lery, anti-aircraft guns, engineers and anti-tank battalions. At the end of 1942
new divisions were brought into action which contained fewer tanks and more
motorized infantry; at the same time ordinary infantry divisions were given
much more weaponry. As Richard Overy explains: The firepower of a typical
infantry division quadrupled during the war, from 250 pounds for each artillery
salvo in 1941 to over 900 pounds in 1944. The Soviet army was transformed from
a labour-intensive military machine to one that was capital-intensive, from reli
ance on men to reliance on machines. As junior commanders became more
familiar with the tactics of modem armoured warfare... the Red Army began to
approach the German battlefield performance. In 1941, six or seven Soviet tanks
were lost for every German one; by the autumn of 1944 the ratio was down to one
to one.27 Similarly the air force, instead of being split up a few planes to each
army unit along the front, was reorganized into air fleets, on German lines,
consisting of fighters, bombers and ground-attack aircraft in each strike fleet.
One glaring Soviet weakness in the early months of the war had been communi
cations, or lack of them; commanders sometimes knew neither the positions of
their own troops nor those of the enemy. This was put right by the introduction
of radios and radar for the air force, radios in tanks, and field telephone systems
which enabled the Russians to plan and carry out complex strategies and opera
tions - like the encirclement of Stalingrad - without the whole plan falling apart.
Another vital improvement was a change in the relationship between the
Red Army and the Communist Party. Once Stalin had recovered from the initial
shock of the German invasion, he took over supreme command of all Soviet
forces; but as disaster followed disaster, he began to take more notice of his
generals and listen to their advice. Vasilevsky became Chief of the General Staff
in July 1942, and Zhukov was appointed deputy supreme commander. Zhukov,
who was as tough and ruthless as Stalin himself, was allowed to argue with Stalin
in a way that no German general dared speak to Hitler. And Stalin respected his
expertise and took his advice; three times he sent Zhukov speeding off to organ
ize the emergency defence of beleaguered cities - Leningrad, Moscow and then
Stalingrad. According to Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin ‘learned a number of import
ant truths from his military advisers, for instance that one could and should go
over to defence not only when the enemy dictates it, but also, as in a number of
operations in 1942, in one's own good time, for the purpose of preparing offen
sive operations.’ After the victory at Stalingrad, although he continued to make
suggestions, Stalin was usually content simply to approve the plans drawn up by
Zhukov, Vasilievsky, Antonov and the front commanders.28 The military leaders
were delighted when Stalin abolished the practice of army officers at every level
having to share their command with political commissars, who usually knew very
little about military matters but insisted on interfering in military decision-making.
Officers always felt, with good reason, that they were being spied on by the
commissars, who were looking out for evidence of ‘bourgeois’ or anti-communist

thinking, and who, given half a chance, would report diem to the NKVD. From
December 1942 the powers of the commissars were much reduced, so that in
effect they were no more than assistants to the commander. At the same time
special officers' uniforms, gold braid and shoulder epaulettes were brought back,
together with the old ranks which had existed in the Tsarist army, and soldiers
were required to treat officers with more respect. Some people saw this as
a ludicrous betrayal of the ‘proletarian' army, but in fact it helped to restore the
confidence of the officer corps and to remove the influence of the party. However,
discipline remained extremely strict for all ranks. Any soldier guilty of desertion
or other dereliction of duty would be sentenced to be shot, although not all of
them were actually executed. Another punishment was to be sent into a penal
battalion. These measure certainly put an end to the mass panics and retreats of
the early part of the war; as we saw earlier, the brutality of the German soldiers
was probably just as effective in encouraging the Soviet troops to stand firm.
Soviet leaders acknowledged that the government was unpopular because of
collectivization and the purges, so they were shrewd enough to present the war
as a desperate struggle to save, not the communist system, but Mother Russia,
from destruction at the hands of fascism. They began to use the term ‘The Great
Patriotic War', and the propaganda made great use of heroic stories from Russian
history. In his speech on the anniversary of the revolution in 1941, with the
Germans only a few miles from Moscow, Stalin urged the people to take encour
agement from the great military heroes of the past - Alexander Nevsky, and
generals Suvorov and Kutuzov who had helped to defeat the French in 1812,
when Napoleon had been forced to retreat from Moscow. Stalin also decided that
religion had a role to play as a force for patriotism; in 1942 the Orthodox Church
and the state were reconciled, and an understanding was reached that they
would forget their differences in their joint struggle to defeat the evils of Nazism.
Churches were allowed to be restored, monasteries and seminaries were
reopened and persecution stopped. Hundreds of gaoled priests were freed and
Stalin allowed the Church to elect a hew spiritual leader - the Patriarch - a position
which the government had kept vacant since 1925. The new Patriarch, Sergei,
sent a message to Stalin which began: ‘I cordially and devoutly greet in your
person the God-chosen leader of our military and cultural forces.’ Muslims and
Jews were given the same freedoms and encouragement. The Orthodox Church
responded with enthusiasm: priests blessed soldiers before they went into battle,
and the Church financed a whole new tank division. Churches all over the coun
try were soon full again, and it seems that the religious groups generally played
a vital role in maintaining the morale of the people.
Equally important was the industrial and economic recovery of the USSR.
When the German occupation reached its greatest extent, the USSR had lost
somewhere approaching half its food-producing area, three-quarters of its
supplies of iron-ore and coal, and three-quarters of its steel production. The situ
ation was saved by the rapid removal of industry and industrial equipment east
wards. It was an incredible operation involving the transportation of over 2500
major enterprises by train, before the Germans could lay hands on them. Some
were reassembled in towns along the Volga and some fruther afield in the Urals
region, in Siberia and in Kazakhstan. Some 25 million skilled workers and their
t \
308 Mastering Twentieth-Century Russen History
families went with them and so did millions of refugees from the occupied areas.
An oft-quoted example was the removal of the entire steelworks at Zaporozhe in
the Ukraine, including all the machinery, rolling-mill equipment and generators,
on 16,000 railway wagons, to a town on the Volga where it was reassembled. An
aircraft factory reassembled on the Volga produced its first plane only two weeks
after the last train carrying its equipment had arrived on 26 November 1941; by
the end of December the factory had produced 30 MiG planes.29 Incredibly the
armaments industry managed to produce over 25,000 aircraft, 60 per cent more
than in 1941, and 24,688 tanks, nearly four times more than in 1941. In 1943 Rus
sian production of both tanks and planes passed the German production figures.
In fact, arms production had already exceeded its pre-war figure by the middle of
1942. Some of the Soviet war material was superior to that of the Germans, espe
cially their latest tanks and their Katyusha rocket launcher. The Urals area saw
the greatest industrial expansion - 3500 new industrial enterprises were built
there during the war, and by 1945 well over half the total metallurgical output of
the USSR was being produced there (as against only one-fifth in 1940); coal pro
duction in the region increased spectacularly - from 12 million tons in 1940 to
257 million tons in 1945. Even the Gulag prisons were made to contribute to the
war effort: it has recendy been calculated that the labour camps produced
approximately 15 per cent of all Soviet ammunition, including 9.2 million anti
personnel mines and 25.5 million shells. They also produced uniforms, leather
goods and gas masks.30
The USSR received material help from its allies, though until recently Soviet
historians were reluctant to admit just how important this assistance was. It was
in food, raw materials and equipment rather than in weapons that the allied con
tribution was most helpful. Recent figures show that the allies provided 53 per
cent of explosives, 58 per cent of aircraft fuel, and almost half the quantity of
copper, aluminium and rubber tyres. Under the ‘Lend-Lease' scheme, the USA
supplied some half a million vehicles - Dodge trucks were especially popular -
and 1900 locomotives, while the USA and Britain supplied 35,000 radio stations
and 380,000 field telephones. Zhukov admitted in 1963 that the USSR could not
have continued the war without foreign aid.31
This economic recovery was only achieved with iron discipline. Control over
all resources was highly centralized, and Gosplan (the State Planning Commis
sion) produced annual military-economic plans. Very strict priorities were
applied and a new slogan was adopted - 'Everything for the Front'. Consumer
goods were almost impossible to obtain and expensive, and wages were strictly
controlled. Workers in industries producing war materials, together with trans
port workers, were placed under military discipline; holidays were suspended,
overtime was compulsory and breaches of discipline were severely punished;
anyone suspected of being a slacker, a saboteur or a collaborator with the enemy
was in danger of being shot; no-one was allowed to leave his or her job without
permission. With so many men involved in military service and such high casual
ties, the economy was heavily dependent on women - by 1943 half the workers
in the war industry were women, and they made up two-thirds of the workforce
in agriculture. Conditions were not pleasant, food was in short supply and ration
cards were introduced in all cities and large towns. A common punishment for

minor acts of indiscipline was the withdrawal of one's ration card. Peasants were
not alloweçl ration cards; they were expected to survive on what was left over
after the government had taken its quotas. In 1942 and 1943 the grain harvest
and the potato crop were less than one-third of the 1940 total; farmers who
had previously grown industrial' crops such as cotton were forced to switch to
growing food in order to survive. Imports of American tinned meat - the famous
spam - helped to supplement the meagre diet.
In spite of all its faults and shortcomings the Soviet system proved to be suffi
ciently adaptable to meet the demands of the war situation. Many historians
believe that Stalin deserves some of the credit for this. He flung himself single-
mindedly into the direction of the war effort and worked long hours, usually into
the early hours, as if to make amends for his mistakes at the beginning of the war.
Other historians have pointed out that because of the prolonged crisis situation,
it was not just the army which enjoyed more freedom from political control:
administrators, officials, managers and planners also found that they had more
freedom to use their initiative. In the end, the war was won through the incred
ible efforts of millions of ordinary Soviet citizens who, in the words of Richard
Overy, ‘were organized, bullied or coaxed by their political masters and
responded to their task with a mixture of crusading zeal and fatalistic duty.' He
quotes Alexander Nevsky's words at the end of Eisenstein’s famous film (made in
1937, banned in 1939 after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and then revived
in 1941):
He who comes to us with the sword, shall perish by the, sword. On that the
Russian land has stood, and will stand?2 ^
7.3 The aftermath of the war and Stalin's fiirçl

years, 1945-53
(a) The cost of victory
The Soviet victory was only achieved by enormous sacrifices of human life, far in
excess of the losses of all the other participants put together. Soviet armed forces
had casualties of over 29 million: 6.2 million killed, over 15 million wounded, 4.4
million captured or missing, and between 3 and 4 million incapacitated by illness
and frostbite. This means that out of the 34.5 million men and women mobilized,
84 per cent died, were wounded or were captured. Recently published official
figures give total military deaths from all causes as 8.6 million, although recent
estimates by Russian historians put the figure much higher; one even suggests
26.4 million. As well as these, there were millions of civilian deaths - those who
were murdered and those who starved to death or died from diseases. The most
reliable recent estimate puts the total civilian deaths at around 17 million, giving
a total Soviet war dead of over 25 million.33 The surviving population were vic
tims too: families were destroyed or disrupted, there were millions of widows
and orphans, and for the government there was the problem of how to cope with
i •*
the tens of thousands of disabled soldiers. The parts of the USSR which had been
occupied by the Germans were left in ruins; factories and collective farms were
all badly damaged, and in some rural areas farmers had almost stopped cultivat
ing the land, except to keep themselves alive. It is estimated that over 1700 towns
and some 70,000 villages were almost completely destroyed. Major cities like
Minsk, Kiev, Vilnius, Smolensk and Stalingrad were heaps of rubble; 25 million
people were homeless, and over one-third of total Soviet wealth had been
destroyed. In effect, the entire modernization programme of the Five-Year Plans
during the 1930s had to be started all over again almost from scratch in the west
ern parts of the country. Yet the victory was seen by Stalin as the ultimate
vindication of his entire system of government, which had passed the sternest
test imaginable - total war. In Stalin's view, the situation at the end of the war
needed something like another military campaign: the entire population had to
be mobilized in the great battle to rebuild the Soviet Union.
(b) Stalin’s final battles

Any Soviet citizens who were expecting more freedom and a more relaxed way of
life as a reward for their superhuman efforts in winning the war were soon disil
lusioned. Stalin was well aware that his people were sick of the rigours of wartime
life and that various groups were talking of radical change. Peasants, disgusted
with the minimal wages paid on the collectives, began to take land back and farm
it for themselves. Industrial workers were protesting about low wages and rising
food prices. The peoples of the recently acquired territories - especially the Baltic
states and the western Ukraine - bitterly resented Soviet rule. There was armed
resistance from Ukrainian nationalists who were not finally crushed until 1949.
The same happened in the Baltic states, Moldavia and Poland where nationalist
guerrillas kept thousands of Soviet troops busy until the early 1950s. Stalin's first
priority was to clamp down before the potential opposition began to threaten his
own position. About 300,000 people were deported or imprisoned from western
Ukraine alone, and the population of the labour camps, which had fallen during
the war, more than doubled to about 2.5 million. Even ordinary industrial work
ers were subject to military-style discipline and peasants were compelled to
return land to the collective farms. Anybody heard voicing subversive thoughts
was likely to be arrested; telephone-tapping was commonplace.
Stalin saw enemies everywhere: Soviet soldiers who had been taken prisoner
by the Germans were considered to be tainted, potential traitors. It seems almost
beyond belief that some 2.8 million Red Army soldiers, who had survived the
appalling treatment in Hitler’s concentration camps, returned to their homeland
only to be arrested and interrogated by the NKVD. Some were shot, some were
sent into the Gulag system, and only about one-fifth were allowed home. One of
Stalin's motives in sending so many people to labour camps was to ensure a con
stant supply of cheap labour for the coal mines and other projects, particularly
the search for uranium needed for the Soviet nuclear programme. Also repatri
ated between 1945 and 1953 under the terms of the Yalta agreement (see next
section) were almost 5.5 million other Soviet citizens who had come into the hands
of the allies during the last months of the war. They were even more suspect in

Stalin's eyes because they had seen that life in the West was materially better
than in the USSR. Some of them were found guilty of collaboration with the
enemy and were executed; about 3 million were sent to labour camps. Stalin also
demanded the return of people who had fled from the USSR before the war,
some as long ago as the Civil War, and who were not even Soviet citizens. The
British complied with this request, although the Yalta agreement did not require
them to do so. The most notorious case was the forcible repatriation by the British
of 50,000 Cossacks, including women, children and old men, in May and June
1945. Many committed suicide rather than cross the frontier into the USSR; the
fate of the rest is still uncertain.34
Even more grotesque was the attack on some of the leading figures who had
served Stalin best during the war, and whom he now saw as potential threats to
his dictatorship. Marshal Zhukov, the hero of so many Soviet victories, was
accused of planning a coup against Stalin and was condemned by the Politburo.
In disgrace, he was sent off to be military commander in Odessa and later in the
Urals; his name almost disappeared from the press and was hardly mentioned in
the new school textbooks on the Second World War. A film was made about the
capture of Berlin in which Stalin was portrayed as the man responsible for
victory; no other generals and no staff officers were shown - just Stalin directing
the battle single-handed. A similar fate befell Rokossovksy and Antonov; the lat
ter was sent even further afield,, down to Transcaucasia. They were the fortunate
ones - several other senior generals were executed on false charges of treason
and some were given long prison sentences.
Having secured his dictatorship, Stalin concentrated on the task of rebuilding
the country, the first priority being to repair the material damage in the ruined
western areas. Once again, as during the war, the people were mobilized to their
task: in Leningrad every able-bodied person had to help with the rebuilding
work - 30 hours a month for workers, 60 hours for those not working, and ten
horns a month for students and children of school age. Most cities ^nd large
towns introduced similar programmes. In his election speech in February 1946
Stalin said that he was looking forward to a future in which industrial output
would be treble that before the war, and that this would be achieved in three five-
year periods. The general target of the Fourth Five-Year Plan, running from 1946
until 1950, was to exceed pre-war output. According to Alec Nove, if the statistics
can be believed, the 1940 levels of industrial production were indeed achieved.
In fact between 1945 and 1950 the output of capital goods, including armaments,
rose by 83 per cent.35As the Cold War became more bitter, armaments remained
the top priority - the 1952 budget provided for a 45 per cent increase in output of
material for the armed forces. The outstanding achievement of the immediate
post-war period was considered to be the successful explosion in Kazakhstan, in
August 1949, of the first Soviet atomic bomb, which meant that the yawning
technical gap in armaments between the USSR and the USA had been bridged.36
The concentration on heavy industry and armaments meant the usual shortage
of consumer goods. But agriculture was the greatest weakness in the economy;
the 1946 grain harvest was even less than that of 1945, partly because of a severe
drought. Ukraine was badly hit, but Stalin insisted that its full quota must be pro
vided; the result was famine, starvation and reports of cannibalism. State control
I V
3 12 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rushan History

over the collective farms was tightened again; grain quotas were increased and
new taxes placed on the peasants, even though their incomes were miserably
low. At the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, the average monthly pay of a collective
farm labourer was about 16 roubles - less than one-sixth of the wages of a typical
factory worker. It was as if Stalin was determined to make the peasants pay for
the reconstruction. Most peasants managed to survive by working their indi
vidual plots, but conditions were so harsh that people left the countryside in
droves. Between 1950 and 1954 around nine million people left the collective
farms; for the first time, agricultural workers made up less than half the total
labour force. It is not surprising that the recovery of agriculture was sluggish in
all departments; in 1952 the grain harvest was still only about three-quarters of
the 1940 harvest; as Alec Nove comments: ‘How could it be tolerated that a coun
try capable of making an A-bomb could not supply its citizens with eggs?'
Another aspect of Stalin’s policies was the drive for Russification, which was
pursued more rigorously than ever before. It took many forms: the introduction
of Russian, or rather Soviet, institutions and practices in the newly acquired
areas - collective farms and nationalized industries, communist party committees
and state-controlled trade unions. Top officials in the non-Russian Soviet repub
lics were usually Russian. In 1951, when the Georgian communist party leaders
tried to take the Georgian Soviet Republic out of the USSR (which in theory was
allowed under the 1936 constitution), Stalin had them removed and shot. Russia
and Russian culture were seen as paramount, and other national cultures were
played down and discouraged. The Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania -
suffered especially from this; the Moldavians, who spoke Romanian, even had
their language changed - they were made to use the Cyrillic alphabet, like the
Russians, and lots of Russian words were added. Great Russian chauvinism was
in the ascendant, and anything which smacked of foreign influence was immedi
ately under suspicion. This is probably why, incredibly in view of all that had
happened in the Holocaust, a new campaign of anti-Semitism was started. Stalin
apparently resented the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of Soviet Jews - their contacts with
fellow-Jews in the USA and in the new Jewish state of Israel, formed in 1948, and
Jewish aid which kept flowing in from abroad. Solomon Mikhoels, a well-known
playwright and leading Jewish spokesman, was murdered on the orders of Stalin
in January 1948. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee set up during the war was
disbanded and its leaders arrested; Jewish schools and libraries were closed
down, and Jewish literature and newspapers banned. Jewish writers and artists
were arrested, Jews in important positions were sacked and they were forbidden
to travel abroad. Trials began in 1951 and were still going on when Stalin died in
1953. Most of the victims were tortured to make them confess to unlikely crimes
such as taking part in a Zionist conspiracy and spying for the West; very few were
acquitted - the usual sentence was execution or labour camp.37
It wasn’t enough that Russian culture was dominant - it had to be Russian
culture as approved by the party. The battle to re-establish control over the intel
ligentsia was launched in August 1946 when the Party Central Committee
attacked the famous poet Anna Akhmatova and the popular satirical writer
Mikhail Zoschenko for their writings in the Leningrad literary journals Zvezda
and Leningrad. Both were expelled from the Writers’ Union because Stalin felt
The G reat Patriotic W ar 3 13

that in the fields of literature and art, attempts were being made to go beyond the
bounds set by the party, that is, by himself. Dmitri Volkogonov believed that
Stalin saw this as a threat to uniform thinking and hence to one-man rule. This
was the signal for the beginning of another purge, and it was aimed principally at
the city of Leningrad.38Zhdanov, the Leningrad party boss and reliable Stalinist,
led the attack, pointing out that the function of writers in Soviet society was to
educate people in Bolshevik realism; at all costs modernism, liberalism and
Westernism must be avoided. Hundreds of writers were expelled from the union,
and other branches of the arts suffered similar repression. In January 1948
Zhdanov turned on Soviet composers, criticizing them for ‘not reflecting our
glorious victories, and for eating out of the hands of our enemies.’ He informed
musicians that they ‘must protect Soviet music from infiltration by elements
of bourgeois corruption; we should not forget that, as in all other fields, the USSR
is the true protector of mankind's musical culture, a wall guarding human
civilization and human culture from bourgeois decay.’ All the leading Soviet
composers - Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Miaskovsky and Khachaturian - were in
disgrace and their music could not be played. They all came back into favour
eventually, Shostakovich after only one year, but Zhdanov’s campaign cast
a blight over Soviet composers for the time being. Although Zhdanov died of
a heart-attack in August 1948,39 the campaign to discipline the intelligentsia,
known as Zhdanovshchina, continued into the early 1950s. Scientists were not
immune either; although he had little scientific training, Zhdanov did not hesitate
to pronounce on Einstein’s relativity theory, cybernetics and quantum mechanics,
which he denounced as bourgeois and reactionary. Many biologists and chem
ists were arrested, though physicists enjoyed more freedom; this was because
scientists working on the nuclear project convinced Beria, who was in charge of
the Special Committee for the Atom Bomb, that if relativity theory and quantum
mechanics were rejected as idealist, then they might as well reject the bomb
itself. Stalin is reported to have remarked to Beria: ‘Leave them in peace. We can
always shoot them later.'40 \
Following the death of Zhdanov, it was not long before the Leningrad party
leaders came under suspicion, particularly Nikolai Voznesensky, who had played
a vital role in planning the Soviet war economy, and Alexei KUznetsov, the out
standing leader of the struggle for survival during the siege. Both were talented
and popular and both were being mentioned as possible successors to Stalin;
that in itself was enough to place them in mortal danger. In 1949, in what became
known as the ‘Leningrad Affair', Georgi Malenkov, one of Stalin’s yes-men who
himself had leadership ambitions, was sent to Leningrad to look into alleged
irregularities. After lengthy ‘investigations', Voznesensky, Kuznetsov and the
entire Leningrad party organization were arrested, charged with the usual variety
of invented offences, beaten to make them confess, and put on trial in September
1950. All the main defendants were found guilty and executed. It seemed as if the
nightmare scenario of the pre-war purges was being re-enacted. None of Stalin’s
close associates could feel safe: in 1949 Molotov was removed from his post as
Commissar for Foreign Affairs which he had held for ten years, and his Jewish
wife, Polina, was arrested, apparently because Stalin did not approve of the
warm welcome she gave to Golda Meir, the first Israeli ambassador in Moscow.
\
I V
The Great Patriotic W ar
Figure 7.3 A rare photograph o f the leader and his henchmen, on their way to a sports meeting in Moscow in 1945. From left to right: Khrushchev,
3 15
Stalin, Malenkov, Beria and Molotov.

Yet Molotov remained a member of the Politburo and Deputy Prime Minister,
giving rise to the bizarre situation that the nominal second-in-command of the
government was powerless to prevent his completely innocent wife being incar
cerated in a labour camp for over three years. Some reports suggested that she
was not in a camp - she was simply being kept in exile as a hostage to guarantee
Molotov’s good behaviour. Stalin even had his own personal physician arrested
when he advised him to take things easy on grounds of failing health; the ageing
dictator did not want the news to get round that his powers were declining, since
that might encourage the others to remove him. In October 1952 Stalin caused
consternation when during a speech to the Party Central Committee, he accused
Molotov and Mikoyan of political cowardice and said he doubted whether they
had the courage and firmness to stick to the agreed policies. Many of the mem
bers were convinced that Stalin was preparing the ground to remove some of his
longest-serving comrades, although the subject was dropped for the time being.
The final act in the drama wà$ the so-called Doctors’ Plot. In November 1952
thirteen Moscow doctors, who at different times had treated Stalin and other
leaders, were arrested and accused of conspiring to kill their eminent patients,
and it was suggested that they had been responsible for Zhdanov’s death four
years earlier. Six of the doctors were Jewish and this was the signal for another
outburst of anti-Semitism. Stalin talked of rounding up all Jews and sending them
to Siberia; on 12 February 1953 the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Israel.
Preparations were being made for a show-trial of the doctors, and there is evi
dence that Stalin was working up to yet another bloody purge of leading figures
in the party, the government, the army and the police, with Molotov, Mikoyan
and Beria at the top of the list. Fortunately for them, on 1 March Stalin collapsed
at his dacha; he often slept late, but when he had still not emerged from his room
at 10.30 in the evening, his staff went in to investigate. They found him lying on
the floor, conscious but unable to speak. They called Malenkov and Beria, but it
was 3.00 am before they arrived. Beria took charge and there was a long delay
before any doctors were called. Eventually doctors arrived and a cerebràl haem
orrhage was diagnosed; there was little that could be done, and Stalin died on
5 March. He had left no instructions about what should be done in the event of his
death, but Beria clearly saw himself as the successor. ’Beria was behaving like the
crown prince of a vast empire,’ wrote Dmitri Volkogonov, ‘with the power of life
and death over all its citizens. For him, Stalin was already the past.'41
7.4 The beginnings of the Cold W ar

(a) The origins of tension
In one sense the origins of the Cold War can be traced back to the 1917 Bolshevik
revolution which set up the Soviet system - an alternative model of political, eco
nomic and social organization which proclaimed itself as the enemy of, and the
successor to the Western capitalist system. The communist system was therefore
viewed with the greatest suspicion by Western capitalist governments, and when
civil war broke out in Russia in 1918 several capitalist states - the USA, Britain,
3 16 Mastering Twentieth-Century Russen History

France and Japan - sent troops to help the anti-communist forces. Although the
intervention was ineffective, Stalin believed that the capitalist states still hoped
to destroy the USSR and that there would be another attack from the West.
Hitler's invasion in June 1941 showed that he had been right. The need for self-
preservation against Germany and Japan caused the USA, the USSR and Britain
to forget their differences and work together in a 'marriage of convenience'. But
the tensions were there almost from the beginning: Stalin constantly complained
that the material help he received from the allies was too little, and that they were
deliberately delaying a second front in Europe in order to force the USSR to do
the bulk of the fighting against the Germans. As soon as it became clear that the
defeat of Germany was only a matter of time, both sides, but especially Stalin,
began to plan for the post-war period.
Stalin's great fear was that the USA and Britain, having got rid of Hitler, might
reach an agreement with Germany to turn their forces against the USSR. His aim
therefore was to capture as much territory as possible as a buffer zone against
invasion. This was why he pushed to occupy eastern Germany and to seize Berlin
before the Americans and British arrived. In the months immediately following
the defeat of Germany, Stalin's actions irritated and alarmed the West; the
Russians expelled five million Germans from the area east of the Oder-Neisse
Line, an area which had belonged to Germany but was now declared by the
Soviet Union to be part of Poland. Stalin also began to interfere in the states of
eastern Europe, setting up pro-communist governments. US President Franklin
D. Roosevelt understood some of Stalin's concerns and wanted to maintain
friendly relations, but at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 he did not tell
Stalin that the USA had developed the atomic bomb. After Roosevelt's death in
April 1945, his successor, Harry S. Truman, who admitted that he was a novice at
foreign affairs, was more suspicious of Stalin's motives and decided to take
a tough line. Stalin was only told about the atomic bomb shortly before it was
used on Japan, and his request that the USSR should take part in the occupation
of Japan was rejected.
(b) Which side was to blame?

The traditional interpretation among Western, particularly American historians,
is that the responsibility for the Cold War must be laid firmly at the door of
Marxism-Leninism, with its fundamental hostility towards capitalist states. The
wartime alliance was only a brief interlude of co-operation against the common
enemy; once Hitler was defeated the old ideological conflict was bound to
re-emerge as Stalin tried to extend communist control over the whole of Europe.
This view was first stated by George F. Kennan, an American diplomat with
a long history of service in Russia before the war; he was asked by the State
Department to write an analysis of Soviet foreign policy. In his reply, known as
the ‘Long Telegram' of February 1946, he claimed that Soviet policy was essen
tially expansionist. World communism,’ he wrote, ‘is like a malignant parasite
that feeds on diseased tissue.' According to Kennan, Stalin, like previous Russian
rulers before him, always needed an outside enemy in order to unite the Soviet
people behind him. Now that Hitler had been defeated, the USA was the next
The Great Patriotic W ar 3 17

obvious enemy. The Soviët leaders believed fanatically that there could be no
peaceful ,co-existence with the USA, and that they would therefore do their
utmost to disrupt and even destroy the traditional Western way of life. No
amount of concessions from the Americans would change the aggressive nature
of the USSR. No capitalist country would be safe - the Soviets would try to under
mine and bring down any government, from Turkey right through to Britain,
which resisted their demands. The capitalist nations must therefore draw together
in a tightly-knit anti-communist bloc under the leadership of the USA.
Historians like William H. McNeill and Herbert Feis were critical of Roosevelt
and Truman for being too accommodating to Stalin: the Russians were allowed to
take Berlin, in spite of contrary advice from Churchill, and they allowed the forma
tion of pro-Soviet states in eastern and south-eastern Europe. Even after Kennan's
‘Long Telegram' Truman continued to work for co-operation with Stalin: the
Americans offered joint US jand USSR control over the production of nuclear
weapons (June 1946), the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Germany (July
1946), and the participation of the USSR and its satellite states in the Marshall
Plan. The USSR accepted none of these offers, and consequently, so the tradi
tional explanadon goes, the USA was forced to change its attitude to the USSR;
there was no alternative but to embark on a policy of containing the expansion
of communism. The Americans assumed the leadership of the remaining non
communist European states, and in order to avert their economic collapse, they
launched a huge programme of aid. At this point the division of both Europe and
the world into two rival blocs became unavoidable. The setting up of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Federal Republic of Germany were
the West's self-defence against aggressive communism. ^
Revisionist historians, mostly American, soon began to challenge the tradi
tional view, arguing that Stalin and the USSR should not be blamed for the Cold
War. They suggested that, given the enormous losses which the Soviet Union
had suffered during the war, it was only to be expected that Stalin would want
to make sure that neighbouring states were friendly. In the view of the revision
ists, Stalin's motives and actions were purely defensive; there is simply no evi
dence that Stalin was ready to do aggressive battle against the USA, and there
was no real military threat to the West from the USSR. Evèn Kennan thought
that the Soviets would use psychological rather than actual military warfare.
The Americans should have been more understanding and should not have
challenged the idea of a Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe. One of
the earliest revisionists, William A. Williams, whose first work was published in
1959, laid much of the blame for the Cold War on the USA and its ‘Open Door'
economic policy. This was the demand that the USA should be given equal
opportunity to trade wherever it wanted without restrictions such as tariffs,
quotas and preferential systems. Since the USA was the most powerful eco
nomic state in the world, an ‘Open Door' system would soon lead to American
economic domination of the world, and consequently political domination
too.42After its victory against Nazism the USA seemed to think it had the right
to intervene wherever it wanted. It had already taken upon itself to hasten the
break-up of the British empire and was forcing Britain to open its traditional
markets to US competition.
t V
The Americans also had their eye on south-eastern Europe as a valuable market,
and there was every sign that they were out to weaken the USSR still further:
Lend-Lease deliveries from the USA stopped immediately the war in Europe
ended, the Americans refused to allow the USSR the high level of reparations
from Germany that they asked for and needed to help their own economic recov
ery, and in May 1946 they stopped any further reparations from the American
zone of Germany. In the revisionists' view, the dropping of atomic bombs on the
Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was a deliberate
demonstration to the USSR of American nuclear power and a warning of what to
expect if they dared to challenge American domination. Stalin's response was to
go all out to produce a Soviet atomic bomb, a feat which was achieved just four
years later, marking the beginning of a terrifying nuclear arms race. The arms
race assured American big business of enormous profits, and in order to ensure
that this continued, the US government created the myth about Soviet aggres
sion and expansion on a vast scale. True the USSR used force to set up the
so-called ‘people's democracies’ in eastern Europe, but this was a reflex defensive
action against American hostility. The revisionist camp was given a boost in the
late 1960s when many people in the USA became critical of American foreign
policy, especially American involvement in the Vietnam War. This caused some
historians to reconsider the US attitude towards communism in general; they felt
that successive US administrations had allowed themselves to become obsessed
with their hostility towards the USSR, and they were prepared to take a sympathet
ic view of Stalin's difficulties. Prominent among the revisionists were Gabriel
Kolko, a student of William A. Williams, whose first book, The Politics of War,
came out in 1968, and Thomas G. Paterson.
Post-revisionist historians argue that both the traditional and the revisionist
interpretations are too simplistic, given the complexity of the situation at the end
of the war. The traditional interpretation ignores the weakness and exhaustion of
the USSR, and overestimates its military strength, the extent to which it could
control foreign communist parties, and the aggressive intent of its leaders. The
revisionist interpretation turns a blind eye to some of Stalin's actions which
seemed to go well beyond the needs of simple defence, and which contributed to
a hardening of American policy towards the USSR. Neither group of historians
used any Soviet sources. As access to official documents has increased, there has
been a steady stream of post-revisionist investigations, mainly by American
historians, who have tried to present a genuinely objective interpretation of the
causes of the Cold War. Each study has its own emphases, but generally they all
agree that both sides must share the responsibility. Influential post-revisionists
include John Lewis Gaddis, Melvyn P. Leffler, Ralph Levering, Vojtech Mastny
and the British historian Martin McCauley.
Gaddis43 believes that Roósevelt was fully aware of Stalin’s problems and
thought his hostility to the West sprang from insecurity. Nor did Roosevelt
regard communism as a threat to the West. As soon as the Americans showed
Stalin that they had no intention of trying to destroy the USSR, his suspicions of
the West would melt away. Roosevelt hoped that after the war, the USA, the
USSR, Britain and China would act together to keep the rest of the world in
order. Unfortunately for Roosevelt, Stalin would never trust another leader after
The Great Patriotic W ar 3 19

his unfortunate experience with Hitler, and he was convinced that the pro
longed delay in launching the second front in Europe was designed to weaken
the USSR. Even after the D-Day landings Stalin continued to complain and
demanded more and more supplies from the USA, until American officials lost
patience. Averell Harriman, the American ambassador in Moscow, who had
fully supported Roosevelt's policy of winning over Stalin, now suggested that
a more firm approach was needed. Truman told Molotov at their first meeting
that relations must stop being all take and no give by the USSR, and that they
must start keeping their agreements. However, the Russians responded by
showing that they could be just as tough as the Americans; following Kennan's
‘Long Telegram' of February 1946, the US government decided on a policy of no
more concessions to the USSR. The main aim of US policy would be ‘contain
ment’ - the limiting of Soviet expansionism - hence the Truman Doctrine and
the Marshall Plan (see next section). However, the post-revisionists also point
out that Kennan himself did^not believe that Stalin would resort to war, and was
not entirely happy with some of steps taken in 1949 and 1950 - the formation of
NATO and the German Federal Republic, and the American decision to build
the hydrogen bomb; he wanted a policy of firmness, but these actions went
much further than that, and seemed calculated to increase Stalin's feelings of
insecurity.
Vojtech Mastny argued that Stalin's drive for control of eastern, central and
south-eastern Europe was far more extensive than could reasonably be claimed
on grounds of security requirements. The crude Soviet methods of forcing
communist governments on the states of eastern Europe were bound to lend
credence to the claims that Stalin’s aims were expansionist. For Mastny, Stalin's
policies were the main cause of the Cold War; but he also believes that If the
Americans, particularly Roosevelt, had made it clear to Stalin very early on that,
while they appreciated his desire for security, there were limits beyond which
they would not allow him to go, he might well have trod more carefully. The fail
ure to stand up to Stalin early enough can be seen as comparable to Britain’s
appeasement of Hitler, and therefore must rank as an important contributory
cause of the Cold War.44
Martin McCauley, looking at the origins of the Cold War from a western Euro
pean standpoint, sees the economic weakness of most of the non-communist
states as an important factor in the development of the Cold War. The west Euro
peans, especially Britain, were in a desperate state economically, and so ‘increas
ingly after 1945 they turned to the United States as their political, economic and
military saviour. From a security point of view western Europe was incapable of
defending itself. Hence the strategy of the containment of the Soviet threat owes
its conception to the European, not the American, m ind... The Truman Doc
trine, the Marshall Plan and, especially, the formation of NATO were articulated
in the United States but were conceived in Europe.' In fact, the Americans were
alarmed at the weakness of their allies and at the same time they overestimated
the power of the USSR. McCauley believes that the Cold War was not inevitable,
that up to the end of 1945 agreement could have been reached. Stalin got things
wrong too: he could have done more in 1945 to form a good working relationship
with the USA, so he must bear some of the blame for the Cold War.45

(c) The lost opportunities of 1945
As the eventual defeat of Germany became certain, the leaders of the Grand
Alliance began to plan what should happen when the war ended. At a meeting
in Moscow in December 1944 Churchill and Stalin came to a rough agreement
about spheres of influence: the USSR was to have a 90 per cent influence in
Romania, and Britain 10 per cent; in Greece the percentages were reversed;
Bulgaria was to be divided 75/25 per cent in favour of the USSR, while in
Hungary and Yugoslavia it was to be 50/50. Nothing final was signed and
Churchill claimed that he had only meant the agreement to last until the end of
the fighting. But this was not the sort of concession that Stalin was likely to let
slip easily.
Next Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met at Yalta in the Crimea in February
1945. Agreement was reached on several points: the setting up of the United
Nations Organization to replace the failed League of Nations; the division of
Germany and Austria into three zones (Soviet, American and British; a fourth
one, for the French, was included later); and free democratic elections in the
states of eastern Europe. In addition Stalin agreed to declare war on Japan and in
return would receive Sakhalin Island, the Kuriles, a group of 31 islands to the
north of Japan, and part of Manchuria. The main source of disagreement was
over the future of Poland: Churchill was prepared to make concessions to Stalin -
some Polish territory was given to the USSR, and the West accepted the Polish
pro-communist government installed by Stalin, on condition that some nation
alists were allowed to serve in it. However, Roosevelt and Churchill were not
happy about Stalin’s demand that Poland should be given all German territory
east of the Rivers Oder and Neisse. No agreement was reached on this point, but
generally the atmosphere at Yalta was cordial. The Russians seemed genuinely to
want to develop a good working relationship with the USA, and they wanted
credit to enable them to buy American technology. In fact, Molotov had already
formally requested a large American loan, somewhere in the region of one billion
dollars; Roosevelt delayed making a decision on this, probably fearing that
Congress would not approve it, and it was not discussed at Yalta.
However, a row soon broke out in March 1945 when the Russians discovered
that a meeting had taken place between German, American and British represen
tatives at Zurich in neutral Switzerland, to discuss the surrender of German
troops in northern Italy. Stalin accused them of planning to sign a separate peace
with Germany in the West behind the backs of the Russians. This of course was
Stalin’s recurrent fear, and according to one of Roosevelt’s biographers, Stalin
sent Roosevelt ‘one of the most insulting communications ever addressed by one
chief of state to another, in which he accused the president of being a liar or
a dupe of his aides.’ Roosevelt protested that Stalin was mistaken, and even after
that, continued to try to be a peacemaker; on 12 April 1945, the day of his death,
in his last message to Stalin, Roosevelt thanked him for his frank discussion of
the ‘Swiss incident,’ which, he said, they now must now put behind them. ‘There
must not, in any event, be mutual mistrust,’ he went on, ‘and misunderstandings
of this character should not arise in the future.’46 Privately, however, Roosevelt
was having serious doubts about Stalin; he now believed that either Stalin was

not a man of his word, or that he did not have as much control over the Soviet
government as Roosevelt thought he had.
The way in which the Soviets behaved in the areas occupied by the Red Army
caused a revulsion of opinion against them in the West, even among those who
were working for a good relationship. In Romania, for example, armed with the
Stalin-Churchill percentages agreement, Andrei Vyshinsky, acting as spokesman
for Stalin, gave King Michael a two-hour ultimatum to choose a Prime Minister
acceptable to Moscow (February 1945). But it hardly mattered whom he chose,
since the Red Army controlled the country anyway. Pro-communist governments
were also installed in Bulgaria and Hungary, and Soviet forces occupied northern
Iran. It was announced that the western border of Poland was the line of the
Rivers Oder and Neisse (March 1945) which was not part of the Yalta agreement;
the Russians proceeded to forcibly expel five million Germans who were living
there. The Americans, still slow to appreciate the USSR's obsession with security,
began to overreact and exaggerated the danger of Soviet expansion. The ‘domino
theory’ emerged - the idea that if a country fell into the Soviet sphere of
influence, its neighbour would soon follow, and the whole area would fall to
communism like a row of dominoes. The Soviets didn’t help their case at this
point by demanding military bases in the Straits and a mandate over the former
Italian colonies. Some influential Americans, including Joseph C. Grew, the
Under Secretary of State, believed that war with the USSR was inevitable. As
preparations were made for the next major conference - at Potsdam in July 1945 -
pressure built up on President Truman to take a tougher line and make no more
concessions.
By the time the Potsdam Conference met, relations had worsened; Stalin
would make no concessions on major issues, except to reduce his reparations
demands on Germany. Truman told Stalin that the USA possessed an atomic
bomb, but this did not make Stalin any more amenable; if anything it made him
even more determined to build up Soviet security. The conference ended reason
ably cordially, however, since it was intended to continue discussion of the major
issues at regular meetings of the three Foreign Ministers. At the first meeting,
held in London in September 1945, the main sticking point was Molotov’s
demand that the West should formally recognize the governments of Romania
and Bulgaria. The Americans would not agree and the meeting broke up in some
disarray. In January 1946 Truman declared that both Romania and Bulgaria were
police states and would not be recognized by the USA until changes were made.
In February Stalin made a fairly conventional speech which was, however, inter
preted by some Americans as an aggressive statement. George Kennan, who was
the American chargé-d'affaires in Moscow, sent a report of the speech, along with
his famous ’Long Telegram’, to Washington, which gave, according to Dmitri
Volkogonov, a misleading and biased account; Kennan reported that Stalin
regarded a Third World War as inevitable, which was certainly not Stalin's view.47
Then in March 1946 Churchill delivered a speech at Fulton, Missouri, in the pres
ence of Truman, in which he said that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the
Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,’ and he called for
an American-British alliance to prevent further Soviet expansion. This drew a
sharp response from Stalin which revealed his fears about Germany and the need
322 Mastering Twentieth-Century1Russian History

to strengthen Soviet security. ‘How can anyone, who has not taken leave of his
senses/ he said, ‘describe these peaceful aspirations of the Soviet Union as
expansionist tendencies on the part of our state?' (Document K).
Thus by March 1946 both sides had lost a great opportunity to forge a suc
cessful working relationship. As Martin McCauley points out, ‘the Soviets were
their own worst enemies;’ their crude behaviour in eastern and south-eastern
Europe seriously offended the West and caused the change in US policy. On the
other hand, there were so many different views on the Soviet Union circulating
in the USA that it was difficult for the Truman administration to formulate a
consistent policy. The problem for US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes had
been to keep public opinion happy by not appearing to be too soft on the
Soviets, while trying in private to co-operate with them. ‘Given the confusion of
views in the US administration, the Soviet government had a difficult task in
judging whether American proposals were genuine or merely trial balloons.’
After 1945 it was almost impossible to break the vicious circle of misinterpretation
and suspicion.48
(d) Europe divided

The American policy of toughness and containment did not bear much fruit,
except that Soviet troops did withdraw from Iran at the end of March 1946.
Throughout 1946 and early 1947 one of the main contentious issues, which the
Russians seemed to be taking as the test of American goodwill, was their demand
for massive reparations from the Germans and their allies. The Americans con-
sistendy refused to agree to this, bearing in mind that the Soviets had already
taken almost everything that was movable from their eastern zone of occupation.
The Russians in turn refused to accept Byrnes’s ‘Open Door’ policy, whereupon
Byrnes ended discussions about a loan to the USSR. When Poland, Czechoslovakia
and Hungary applied to the World Bank for loans, they were refused. Meanwhile
the main problem in western Europe was economic: most of the countries were
finding recovery extremely difficult - they all had trade deficits, the 1946 harvests
were generally poor, the winter of 1946-47 was unusually severe, and there was
a shortage of coal. The future of Germany was still undecided: the French were
against all suggestions of treating the country as a single unit, either politically or
economically, since they wanted the Rhineland and the Ruhr to be detached
from the rest. AU these countries needed economic help, and there was only one
state in the world which could afford to provide it - the USA. But Truman,
a Democrat president, was faced with a Republican Congress bent on reducing
expenditure, and which was unlikely to agree to loans and credits to Europe on
the vast scale that was needed.
Early in 1947 the Truman administration came up with what seemed a brilliant
solution to this problem: the loans must be made to appear necessary to enable
western Europe to pursue the fight against communist expansion. In February
1947 Britain announced that it could no longer afford to continue its müitary and
economic aid to Greece and Turkey. The Greek government was fighting the
communists, and Turkey was resisting Soviet demands for a base on the Straits.

Map 7,2 Soviet expansion 1939-49 and the Iron Curtain.
Neither situation was critical, but Truman was able to use them to present the
first part of his plan to Congress. In March 1947 he told both houses of Congress
that every nation was faced with a choice between two alternative ways of life.
‘One way of life is based on the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free
institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual
liberty... The second way of life is based on the will of a minority forcibly
imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled
\ \
press and radio» fixed elections» and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe
that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are
resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.1
The Truman Doctrine, as it became known, impressed Congress sufficiently for it
to vote the necessary funds for Greece and Turkey. An opinion poll showed that
75 per cent of Americans were in favour of Truman's policy; it was popular because
it seemed to champion the American way of life and its success in winning the
war against fascism.
The Soviet response was guarded; although his speech was clearly directed at
the USSR, Truman had avoided mentioning either the Soviets or communism,
and described the oppressive governments he had in mind as 'totalitarian*. Stalin
could hardly protest publicly, since this would be to admit that his regime was
totalitarian; privately, however, Molotov told the Soviet ambassador in Washing
ton; ‘the President is trying to intimidate us, to turn us at a stroke into obedient
little boys. But we don’t give a damn.' The second part of the American plan was
unveiled in June 1947 by Secretary of State George Marshall (who had taken over
after Byrnes resigned in December 1946) in a speech delivered at Harvard Uni
versity. He explained that the USA was willing to make grants to European states
provided they produced plans for European economic integration, which was
seen by many Americans as the best way to bring about a prosperous Europe.
‘Our policy,’ he said, ‘is directed not against any country or doctrine but against
hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.’The proposals were to apply to the USSR
and the states of eastern Europe as well as to western Europe and Germany; if
necessary the western zones of Germany would be developed as a separate unit.
The Marshall Plan, as it was known, had a great deal to commend it: the French
would have no need to fear the growth of a powerful German economy, because
their economies would be integrated; a prosperous Europe would be less likely to
fall to the communists and more likely to buy larger quantities of American
goods. By offering aid to the states of eastern Europe, Marshall hoped that he
could reduce their dependence on the USSR and enable them to escape from
Soviet control.
The Marshall Plan put the USSR in a difficult situation: Stalin, Molotov and
Mikoyan, the Foreign Trade Commissar, knew that they and the states of eastern
and south-eastern Europe badly needed American aid, but they did not want the
USA to get any sort of economic or political hold over the region, which they
passionately saw as their sphere of influence. Yet if they rejected US aid, western
Europe would become wealthy and prosperous while the east would languish in
poverty and take much longer to recover. At the meeting of the leading Foreign
Ministers in Paris a few weeks later, Molotov said that the USSR wanted the aid,
but with no strings attached; the French and British and their American advisers
insisted that a co-ordinated plan for the entire European economy must be
drawn up. The USSR rejected the idea of their economy being integrated into
a capitalist system; Molotov accused the West of simply using the Marshall Plan
as a ploy to enable them to interfere in eastern Europe, and called it ‘dollar
imperialism.’ Mikoyan tried to persuade Stalin that American aid would enable
the USSR to recover much more quickly and on a higher technological level,
which would actually make them more independent. But Stalin would not be

convinced; he sent a telegram to Molotov in Paris, and the next day he rejected
the proposals. The Americans at least were relieved - Washington would have
been somewhat embarrassed if Molotov had accepted! The British and French
still hoped that the east Europeans would join the plan, and invited all interested
governments to send representatives to a meeting in Paris. Initially the Czechs,
Poles and Hungarians seemed enthusiastic; but there was no way that Stalin
would allow them to take part, once he had decided against it for the USSR.
It was made clear that any state which accepted the invitation to Paris would
incur the massive displeasure of the Soviet Union, and in the end all the govern
ments of eastern Europe opted out.
Stalin wanted to offer something positive in place of the Marshall Plan; if west
ern Europe was to have an integrated economy, why not something similar in
eastern Europe? In August the USSR and the east European states began forming
their own trade agreements and moving towards a separate trading bloc; before
long Europe had divided into two hostile economic blocs. From then on it was
inevitable that closer political links would develop between the USSR and the
states of eastern Europe. The communist leaders in Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia were invited to a conference in
Poland in September 1947. Also present were the leaders of the French and Ital
ian communist parties, the two most influential communist parties in western
Europe. The main Soviet representative was Andrei Zhdanov, who told the
conference that the world had now divided into two hostile camps. One was the
capitalist-imperialist camp led by the USA which was bent on the ‘enslavement
of Europe'; the other was the anti-imperialist and democratic camp led by the
USSR. While he did not consider that war between the two was inevitable, he
said, nevertheless the communist parties of eastern Europe, France and Italy
must prepare themselves for an economic and psychological struggle; he was
critical of the French and Italian communists for being too conciliatory and urged
them to become more militant. The conference ended with the formation of the
Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) whose function was to>encourage
the setting up of fully communist governments with centrally controlled and
planned economies like that in the USSR.
Gradually the Soviet grip on eastern Europe tightened. By tlje summer of 1948
all the countries of eastern Europe, apart from Greece and Finland, had com
munist governments. To be communist was not enough, however; it had to be
communism according to Stalin. By this time he was so used to being the dictator
at home that he expected to play the dictator over his allies (Document J). When
Yugoslavia signed friendship treaties with Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, and
Bulgaria announced the formation of a Balkans customs union without consulting
him first, Stalin was furious. Their representatives were summoned to a meeting
in Moscow in February 1948. The Yugoslavs refused to be dictated to by Stalin;
their leader, Josef Broz, known as Tito, had won power for his communist party
without any help from Moscow by fighting the German occupying forces. He was
tough and self-confident; he believed that there could be many different
‘national roads to socialism’ and that the leaders of each state, though communist,
should be ‘master in their own house’. It was the first serious resistance that
Stalin had encountered for years; according to Milovan Djilas, one of the Yugoslavs

present at the meeting, he treated them as though they were party leaders from
one of his own republics who were expected to accept all his utterances as orders
to be obeyed without question. Stalin reacted with a rush of blind fury; Djilas and
Bokaric, the other Yugoslav representative, were taken at dawn to the airport and
shoved into a plane without ceremony. Stalin decided that Tito must be
removed; he seemed to think, as Khrushchev put it at the Twentieth Party Con
gress, that he had only to wag his little finger and Tito would be no more. Tito
and his colleagues were accused of being Trotskyists, and Stalin expected that
the Yugoslav communist party would remove them. But Tito was popular and his
supporters remained loyal; it was the pro-Soviet Yugoslav communists who were
expelled from their Central Committee and arrested. Stalin retaliated by having
Yugoslavia expelled from the Cominform (June 1948), and all the other members
broke off diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia, which was left isolated, outside
both camps. Fortunately for Yugoslavia, the USA and Britain provided some help
and Tito was able to survive to pursue his own brand of non-Soviet communism.
Not one to give up easily, Stalin ordered Beria to ‘get rid’ of Tito; several assas
sination attempts were arranged but they all failed. Stalin had suffered his first
major post-war defeat
As the rift with Yugoslavia widened, Stalin became more determined than ever
that the other states should be kept on a tight rein. Leaders who attempted to
follow independent policies were arrested; Stalin had the power to make this
happen because they lacked Tito’s popularity and owed their positions to Soviet
support In Hungary the Foreign Minister Laszlo Rajk and Interior Minister Janos
Kadar, both anti-Stalin communists, were arrested; Rajk was hanged, Kadar was
tortured and gaoled, and about 200,000 people were expelled from the party
(1949). In Bulgaria the Prime Minister, Traichko Koslov, was arrested and
executed (1949), while in Czechoslovakia the party general secretary, Rudolph
Slansky, and ten other cabinet ministers were executed (1952). In Albania the
Communist premier, Koze Xoxe, was executed, and in Poland the party leader
and Vice-President, Wladislaw Gomulka, was imprisoned; both had spoken out
in support of Tito.
The remaining outstanding problem at the beginning of 1948 was the future of
Germany. Stalin had originally been in favour of a reunited Germany, but the
West, nervous about the potential threat, would not agree, and it seemed clear
that Germany would remain divided. On 6 March 1948 the Western powers,
anxious to speed up the economic recovery of their zones so that they could
begin to pay their way, announced that a separate state of West Germany was to
be created, with its own government. The USSR protested that this was a breach
of the Potsdam agreement, but could do very little about it except instruct the
Soviet representative on the allied council which controlled Germany to walk
out. In June 1948, in preparation for the launching of the new state, the West
introduced a new currency into their zones; on 23 June this was introduced into
West Berlin as well. Stalin responded swiftly in the only area where it was
possible for him to make an impact - against West Berlin. A blockade was placed
on all road, rail and canal links between the western zones of Germany and West
Berlin. His aim was primarily to pressurize the West into abandoning their plans
for a West German state, though it would be a bonus if the blockade forced them

out of West Berlin. However, the Western nations, always expecting the worst
from Stalin, assumed that his main aim was to drive them out of West Berlin and
then invade the rest of Germany. They resolved to hold on at all costs and began
a massive airlift of supplies to keep the two and a half million West Berliners from
starving, rightly judging that the Soviets would not risk shooting down the trans
port planes. Just in case, Truman sent a fleet of American B-29 bombers to take
up positions on British airfields, showing that if necessary he was prepared to use
nuclear weapons. Stalin had no intention of provoking a war and made no attempt
to interfere with the airlift, which succeeded in keeping the West Berliners alive
through the winter of 1948-49. In May 1949, when the blockade had obviously
failed, Stalin called it off; with the help of the United Nations the four powers
signed an agreement bringing the crisis to an end and restoring the status quo in
Berlin. It was another failure for Stalin: he had gambled but the West had called
his bluff. Instead of preventing the setting up of a separate West Germany, he had
precipitated its formation - the newly elected federal government of West Germany
first took office in August 1949. In the USA and Britain public opinion was out
raged at the Soviet blockade and there was a great outburst of anti-communist
feeling. Stalin’s response, in October 1949, was to set up the Soviet zone as the
German Democratic Republic.
Although it was a failure, Stalin’s action had nevertheless shocked the states of
western Europe; although he had never had any intention of launching an inva
sion of western Germany, many Europeans and Americans were left with the
terrifying vision of vast Soviet tank armies rolling forward through Germany and
into the West Joint preparations seemed to be the best way forward; in April
1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed by the USA,
Canada, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal, Den
mark, Eire, Italy and Norway. They agreed to regard an attack on any one of them
as an attack on them all, and they placed their defence forces under a joint NATO
command which would co-ordinate the defence of the West. To the USSR the
formation of NATO was yet another challenge from American imperialism and
militarism, to which Stalin responded by creating the Council for Mutual
Economic Assistance (Comecon), designed to co-ordinate the economic policies
of the eastern bloc states. Later, after Stalin’s death, the USSR and its satellites
signed the Warsaw Pact (1955), a military alliance which was the Soviet equivalent
of NATO.
By 1950 the Cold War was spreading even more widely, involving China and
Korea. In 1949, after many years of civil war, the Chinese communists under the
leadership of Mao Zedong were at last victorious; Chiang Kai-shek and the
remnants of his nationalist forces were driven off the mainland to the island of
Taiwan. The USSR and the USA clashed repeatedly in the United Nations over the
question of China. The Soviet Union proposed that Communist China should be
admitted to the UN, taking the permanent Security Council place held by Nation
alist China. This proposal was rejected, whereupon the Soviet representatives
walked out of the Security Council session, and continued to boycott the meet
ings for several months. This turned out to be a serious mistake, when in June
1950, war broke out in Korea, as non-cpmmunist South Korea was invaded by
troops from communist North Korea, th e UN Security Council passed resolu-
328 Mastering Twentieth-Century K ^sian History

tions condemning North Korea and calling on member states to send help to the
south. It was only possible to pass these resolutions because of the absence of the
Soviet representatives who would have vetoed them if they had not still been
boycotting the sessions. UN troops, mainly American, soon drove the North
Koreans out of the south, invaded North Korea, occupying much of the country,
and reaching the frontier with China. Afraid that the Americans would press on
and invade China itself, Mao Zedong launched a massive counter-attack, driving
the UN out of the north and occupying a large part of South Korea (January
1951). Stalin was anxious to avoid direct Soviet involvement, and he was shrewd
enough to realize that this was an extremely dangerous moment. US General
MacArthur, who was in command of UN troops, was shocked at the strength
of the Chinese forces and wanted to attack Manchuria, using atomic bombs if
necessary.
At about the same time other American military leaders were talking about
using nuclear weapons against the USSR before the Soviets were able to make
many atomic bombs themselves. Early in 1952 British naval intelligence warned
the British government that the successful explosion of the Soviet atomic bomb
in 1949 had produced a kind of paranoia in the USA. ‘Many people in America
have made up their minds that war with Russia is inevitable,' it was reported,
‘and there is a strong tendency in military circles to fix the zero date for war.’
One US general was reported to have remarked: ‘We can afford to create a
wilderness in Russia without serious repercussions on western civilization. We
have a moral obligation to stop Russia’s aggression by force... Whether we call
it a cold war or apply any other term, we are not winning; the only way we can
be certain of winning is to take the offensive as soon as possible and hit Russia
hard enough to at least prevent her from taking over Europe.’ The report went
on to describe the ‘war-mongering fever in American cities whose inhabitants
visualize in their own home town the ruins of Hamburg and Berlin.' Fortu
nately, moderation prevailed; the writer of the British report added that in his
view, the USSR was far too cautious to start a war.49This was an accurate assess
ment: Stalin, Mao and Truman were anxious to avoid an escalation of the
Korean War into a major conflict, and opted for negotiation; MacArthur was
removed from his command and in June 1951 peace talks began. When Stalin
died in 1953 the Cold War was still at its height; but at least his caution
and moderation in the last two years had perhaps helped to head off a Third
World War.
7.5 Assessments of Stalin

When Stalin died there was widespread and genuine grief; thousands of people
flocked to view his body as he lay in state, and so great was the chaos that many
were crushed to death. For 25 years the population had been brain-washed into
regarding him as a kind of god, whose opinion on every subject was correct.
Portraits of Stalin were everywhere - on street corners, on walls, on trains and
trams, and in parks; towns and collective farms, schools, factories, power stations

and even the highest peak in the Caucasus Mountains had been named
after him. A large picture of Stalin was suspended from a balloon over Red
Square in Moscow. His body was embalmed and placed in a glass case next to
Lenin in what was now renamed the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum. However, his
reputation in the USSR soon went into decline when Khrushchev delivered his
sensational speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, denoun
cing Stalin's excesses. After another critical speech by Khrushchev in 1961, his
body was removed from the mausoleum and buried beneath the Kremlin wall.
In 1987 Mikhail Gorbachev also condemned Stalin, and two years later Dmitri
Volkogonov’s biography appeared in which he described Stalin and Stalinism as
‘monstrously inhuman.' It is difficult not to be influenced by the general anger of
Russian historians during the glasnost period directed against both Stalin and
Lenin. This is why it is good to welcome the attempts by some of the younger
generation of Western historians during the 1990s - the new cohort - to take a
more detached view and emphasize the positive aspects of the Stalin period,
treating it as though it were a normal regime. Stephen Kotkin even went so far as
to subtitle his book Magnetic Mountain, which was published in 1995, Stalinism
as a civilization.
So how does one begin to assess a phenomenon like Stalin, whose regime can
by no stretch of the imagination be described as ‘normal’? The important ques
tion surely is: what sort of impact did he have on the USSR? Was it for good or ill?
Did he leave the USSR a better place than when he came to power? Did he
achieve his aims? Of one thing there can be no doubt - he changed things
dramatically, as we have seen. This was the time when the Soviet Union, in the
words of Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘was at its most dynamic, engaging in social and eco
nomic experiments that some hailed as the future becoming manifest and others
saw as a threat to civilization.'50 Collectivization, the Five-Year Plans and the
rapid industrialization, the new constitution, the rise of the new bureaucracy, the
spread of mass education and social services, and the creation of thq new ‘cul
tured’ Soviet citizen - all these can be traced either directly or indirectly to Stalin.
But this was not simply a ‘revolution from above'; there was a great deal of public
support and initiatives springing from the grass-roots - a revolution from below.
In fact the regime was extremely popular with the top and middle ranks of the
bureaucracy in the party, in the various ministries, in the army and navy, in the
security forces and among Komsomol members. These were the people who had
risen from the working classes and owed their privileged positions to Stalin, and
who would do their utmost to defend the Soviet state.
Stalin was also popular with the majority of ordinary people, which might
seem surprising since most families must have lost at least one member during
the course of the purges. Volkogonov asks the question: ‘how was it that a man so
unattractive and politically repellent as Stalin was able to make an entire nation
love him?'51 The answer is that he was extremely adept at manipulating public
opinion, and had the knack of being able to rally support at vital moments by
presenting himself as the great pupil of Lenin, the wise father-figure and the
great Russian patriot who was devoting himself to the nation. Even some of his
strongest critics admit that during the war he did much to keep morale high
during the black days toward^ the end of 1941 and deserves some credit for the
»v
Soviet victory. He never admitted he had made a mistake, always managing to
shift the blame on to somebody else. If there were excesses, these were the fault
of his underlings; he succeeded in giving the impression, rather like the Tsars
before him, that injustices would be put right if only he knew about them. The
public, unaware of the realities, believed what it was told, and was deeply
shocked by Khrushchev's ‘de-Stalinization’ speech in 1956.
The policies themselves had, at best, mixed success; whichever way you look at
it, collectivization was a disaster; industrial modernization was a great success in
the areas of heavy industry and armaments and enabled the USSR to win the war.
The development of the atomic bomb was a considerable achievement which
came about through the insistence and determination of Stalin. On the other
hand Soviet industry never solved the problem of how to produce enough house
hold goods, shoes, clothes and furniture. Many of the faults caused by the rapid
pace of industrialization still persisted - wasteful methods and poor-quality
products. Living standards for the vast majority of people were lower than when
Stalin became dominant; the real wages of workers were lower, living and working
conditions were no better, and diet was if anything more limited; workers were
restless and resentful but dare not go on strike. For a regime which had come
into existence in 1917 with the express goal of creating a state run by and for the
workers, this must be seen as something of a failure. Nor had the state got any
nearer to ‘withering away; according to Robert Service: ‘Stalin and his subordi
nates still talked about the eventual realization of communism, reaffirming that
"the state will not last for ever”. But how to create a communist society was not
a question under consideration. Far from it. The specific aspirations of the Soviet
working class no longer figured prominently in Soviet propaganda/52 Many his
torians believe that just as much, and perhaps even more industrial progress
could have been made using more conventional methods, perhaps even by simply
continuing NEP. Holland Hunter and Donald Filtzer both suggest that the Five-
Year Plans, as well as reducing the Soviet workers to resentful unco-operativeness,
also left the Soviet state on very shaky economic foundations. Some historians
take a more sympathetic view; as we saw earlier (section 6.4(d)), Martin McCauley
believes that more was achieved during the First Five-Year Plan ‘than would have
been the case had orthodox advice been followed/ Stalin aimed to create a totali
tarian state (see section 6.5(f)) but he did not fully succeed; there were huge gaps
between the orders from Moscow and what actually happened in the factories
and on the collective farms. Those groups who actively supported the system
made up only a tiny proportion of the total population - a very narrow base
indeed.
Stalin’s mistakes during the war almost caused the destruction of the USSR;
his refusal to listen to warnings of the impending invasion led to the rapid loss
of Ukraine, Belorussia and the western parts of Russia, together with much of
the country’s industrial strength. His refusal to listen to the advice of his military
commanders in the early months of the war resulted in the death or capture of
millions of soldiers when they were caught in the German encircling move
ments. The enormous Soviet casualties in the war seemed to leave Stalin
unmoved, and never once is he recorded as having expressed regret or distress
at the human suffering that must have been involved. Volkogonov claims that

he was never tormented by conscience or grief at the enormous losses; ‘there
is not a single document in Staff HQ archives showing his concern about the
number of human lives lost. He was oblivious of the fundamental principle of
the military art, namely, that the objective should be gained at minimal cost in
human life/53 Arguably, the USSR won the war in spite of Stalin rather than
because of him. The evidence suggests that Stalin placed little value on human
life; otherwise how could he have allowed so many of his people to die before
their time? Collectivization caused the uprooting and deportation of hundreds
of thousands of so-called kulaks, some 381,000 families, and there were many
premature deaths. The famine of 1932-33, deliberately caused by Stalin in order
to bring the countryside under control, resulted in between five and eight
million deaths. The purges of the 1930s and the Great Terror of 1936-38 caused
hundreds of thousands more people to be executed or sent to the Gulag. The
brutalities continued duringjhe war, alongside the normal war casualties: in the
autumn of 1941 the government uprooted 400,000 Volga Germans and deported
them to Central Asia and Siberia in case they tried to co-operate with the invad
ing Germans. In 1943-44 Stalin ordered the deportation of about a million
people - Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Balkars, Kalmiks and Turks - from their
native homelands to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Accused of helping the
enemy, they were rounded up by the NKVD and crammed into freezing cattle-
trucks. It was quite unnecessary, since only a handful of Chechens showed any
inclination to collaborate with the Germans. Thousands died on the way and
more died when they were simply abandoned at their destinations without any
accommodation or food; about 40 per cent of those deported perished through
hunger, cold and disease.
Was Stalin paranoid, psychologically unbalanced, as some historians have
argued? Khrushchev claimed that he was ‘a very distrustful man, sickly suspi
cious; we knew this from our work with him' (Document H). Roy Medvedev
believes that he was perfectly sane and coolly ruthless: T still think that the main
motives were Stalin's inordinate vanity and lust for power. He aspired to autocratie
one-man rule, with no restraints whatsoever, he wished to take undeserved
credit for building up the Soviet state and Communist party, and to those ends
he promoted a personal cult of himself.' Stalin did not hesitate to destroy any
section of people in the party or the state which seemed likely to be an obstacle
to the achievement of his goals.54 Even after the war there was no thought of
rewarding the people for their efforts, only a continuation of the same harsh
policies; at his death in 1953 there were still 2.5 million people in labour camps.
This was the fundamental flaw in his whole philosophy and approach - that his
regime had to be sustained by force and terror; the secret police and the forced
labour camps were an integral part of his system, and this seemed to be perfectly
acceptable in his eyes. He ruled his close associates by fear: Bulganin once
remarked to Khruchchev that ‘it has happened sometimes that a man goes to
Stalin on his invitation as a friend. And when he sits with Stalin, he does not
know where he will be sent next, home or to jail.’ Alan Bullock compares him to
a mafia boss who keeps his henchmen where they are, not out of sentiment, but
because they are still useful to him. ‘Having instilled fear like any other gangster
boss by displaying his power to kill, he had the sense to see that the men he
I V

depended on for carrying out his orders needed a reasonable expectation of
continued favour or they might decide that the dangers of betraying him were
less than the dangers of continued loyal service/55 Even so there seems little
doubt that just before his death he was planning to get rid of Mikoyan and
Molotov, whose wife had been in prison, labour camp or exile for three years.
The lower ranks too were kept under control by fear. Stalin was responsible for
the deaths of millions of people, although he always made sure that other mem
bers of the Politburo signed the death warrants as well as himself. Like Hitler,
Stalin created the climate, the atmosphere in which this sort of terror could be
possible, and there were huge numbers of people from those at the top like
Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria, down to interrogators, torturers, guards, executioners
and NKVD troops who were willing to carry out his orders. The evidence shows
too that local party bosses - little Stalins - often initiated their own terrors, from
below. It simply was not possible to express any sort of criticism of the regime in
public and expect to survive; many people who lived through this period have
said that it was like living a double life: one was the life in public where you said
the acceptable things and used the correct language expected of the new Soviet
person; the other was lived in private where you said what you really believed.
The staggering fact is that Stalin and his system, whatever their genuine achieve
ments might be, were responsible for the deaths of around 20 million of their
own people, over and above those who died as a result of the war. This was more
than twice the number of people put to death by Hitler and the Nazis.
The question of whether Stalinism was a continuation of Leninism, which was
discussed earlier (see section 5.10(c)) is still being debated among Russian histo
rians. The general trend is to demonize both of them, though there are some, like
Irina Pavlova, who maintain that it was only under Stalin that the party appar
atus became all-powerful and synonymous with the state. While Lenin was alive
there was still a degree of discussion and democracy within the party, and the
annual party congresses were not the sham events that they became under
Stalin. Stalinism took time to evolve and can in no way be seen as inevitable;
a different leader could have caused the system left by Lenin to have evolved in
a different direction. In fact as Otto Latsis pointed out in 1989, 'Stalinism's first
victim was Leninism.'56Lenin's communist party was eliminated and mainstream
Bolshevik thinking was abandoned. So it seems that there was a clear break
between Stalin and Lenin, and it is difficult not to agree with Stephen Cohen that
'Stalinism was excess, extraordinary extremism... a holocaust by terror that
victimized tens of millions of people for twenty-five years.'57 Stalin hi-jacked the
revolution and turned it into his own personal dictatorship. The workers and
peasants had exchanged one set of exploiters for another. Robert C. Tucker writes
in his introduction to the 1999 edition of a collection of essays on Stalinism: ‘one
contention to which all the contributors to this volume would likely find them
selves in agreement is the conclusion by Roy A. Medvedev that Stalin was “one of
the greatest criminals in human history".' Perhaps the most sensible conclusion
on Stalin and Stalinism is the one by Martin McCauley: ‘Whether one approves
or disapproves of it, it was a truly remarkable phenomenon, one that profoundly
marked the twentieth century. One can only approve of it if one suspends moral
judgement.'56

Documents
(A) Extracts from Hitler’s directives for Operation Barbarossa and the treatment
of the Ukraine, and his thoughts on how he intended to organize the USSR
after the war.
Operation Barbarossa - directive signed on 18 December 1940

The German armed forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick
campaign even before the conclusion of the war against England... the mass
of the Russian army in western Russia is to be destroyed by driving forward
deep armoured wedges; and the retreat of units capable of combat into the
vastness of Russian territory is to be prevented... The ultimate objective is
to establish a defence line running from the Volga river to Archangel. Then,
the last industrial area left to Russia in the Urals can be destroyed by the
Luftwaffe.
Directive dated 23 May 1941, concerning the Ukraine

The population of the northerly regions, especially the urban, will have to look
forward to the severest famine. It will be essential to drive the population into
Siberia. Efforts to save the population from starving to death by bringing
surplus food from the black soil region can be made only at the expense of
feeding Europe. This would undermine Germany’s ability to hold out in the
war. From this there follows the extinction of industry as well as of a large
percentage of the human beings in the hitherto deficit areas of Russia.
Hitler in conversation - 27 July and 17 October 1941

It should be possible for us to control this region in the east with 250,000
men plus a cadre of good administrators. Let's learn from the English, who,
with 250,000 men in all, including 50,000 soldiers, govern 400 million
Indians. This space in Russia must always be dominated by Germans... We
have undertaken the construction of roads that will lead to the Crimea and
to the Caucasus. These roads will be studded along their whole length with
German towns, and around these towns our colonists will settle... We
shan’t settle in the Russian towns and we’ll let them go to pieces without
intervening. And above all, no remorse on this subject! We’re absolutely
without obligations as far as these people are concerned. To struggle
amongst the hovels, chase away the fleas, provide German teachers - very
little of that for us!... Let them know just enough to understand our high
way signs, so that they won’t get themselves run over by our vehicles. For
them the word ‘liberty’ means the right to wash on feast days. There's only
one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to
look upon the natives as Redskins... In this business I shall go straight
ahead, cold-bloodedly.
Source: quoted in Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, pp. 765,773,799-800.
i v
(B) Extract from a report by German Einsatzgruppe Coperating in the Ukraine.
In Kiev the Jewish population was invited by poster to present themselves for
resettlement. Although initially we had only counted on 5000-6000 Jews
reporting, more than 30,000 appeared; by a remarkably efficient piece of
organization, they were led to believe in the resettlement story until shortly
before their execution.
Source: quoted in Bullock, p. 830.
(C) Extract from an article in the army journal Red Star by Ilya Ehrenburg, a well-
known Russian writer.
Now we know. The Germans are not human. Now the word 'German' has
become the most terrible swear word. Let us not speak. Let us not be indig
nant. Let us kill. If you do not kill the German, he will kill you... If you have
killed one German, kill another. There is nothing jollier than German corpses.
Source: quoted in Richard Overy, Russia's War, pp. 163-4.
CD) Stalin calls for a 'scorched earth' policy in his radio broadcast on 3 July 1941.
In consequence of this war which has been forced upon us, our country has
come to death grips with its bitterest and most cunning enemy - German
fascism. Our troops are fighting heroically against an enemy armed to the
teeth with tanks and aircraft. Side by side with the Red Army, the entire Soviet
people is rising in defence of our native land...
The enemy is cruel and implacable. He is out to seize our lands watered by
the sweat of our brows, to seize our grain and oil secured by the labour of our
hands. He is out to restore the rule of the landlords, to restore tsarism, to destroy
our national cultures and our national existence, and to turn us into slaves of
German princes and barons. Thus the issue is one of life and death for the
Soviet State, of life and death for the peoples of the USSR.
In case of a forced retreat of Red Army units, all rolling stock must be
evacuated, the enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway
carriage, not a single pound of grain or gallon of fuel. The collective farmers
must drive off all their cattle and turn over their grain to the safe keeping of
the state authorities for transportation to the rear. All valuable property,
including non-ferrous metals, grain and fuel that cannot be withdrawn must
be destroyed without fail. In areas occupied by the enemy, guerrilla units,
mounted and on foot, must be formed. Sabotage groups must be organized
(continued)

to combat enemy units, toblow up bridges and roads, damage telephone and
telegrapb lines, set fire to forests, stores and transports. In occupied regions
conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and all his accomplices.
They must be hounded and annihilated at every step, and all their measures
frustrated.
Source: quoted in F.W. Stacey, Stalin and the Making of Modem Russia, pp. 50-1.
(E) Alexander Werth, a British war-correspondent, who spent some time in

Leningrad during the later part of the siege, describes conditions.
To fill their empty stomaqhs, to reduce the intense sufferings caused by

hunger, people would look for incredible substitutes; they would try to catch
crows or rooks, or any cat or dog that had still somehow survived; they would
go through medicine chests in search of castor oil, hair oil, vaseline or glycerine;
they would make soup or jelly out of carpenter's glue (scraped off wallpaper
or broken-up furniture). But not all people in the enormous city had such
supplementary sources of 'food'.
Death would overtake people in all kinds of circumstances; while they were
in the streets they would fall down and never rise again; or in their houses
where they would fall asleep and never awake; in factories, where they would
collapse while they were doing a job of work. There was no transport, and the
dead body would usually be put on a handsleigh drawn by two or three moip-
bers of the dead man’s family. Often wholly exhausted during the long trek to
the cemetery, they would abandon the body half-way, leaving it to the author
ities to deal with it.
Source: quoted in Stacey, p. 53.
(F) Marshall Vasilevsky, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, complains in his
memoirs about Stalin’s military performance (February 1942).
Stalin expressed great dissatisfaction with the work of the General Staff... At
that time Stalin’s performance suffered from miscalculations, sometimes quite
serious ones. He was unjustifiably self-confident, headstrong, unwilling to lis
ten to others. He overestimated his own knowledge and ability to guide the
conduct of a war directly. He relied very little on the General Staff and made no
adequate use of the experience and skills of its personnel. Often for no reason
at all he could make hasty changes in the top military leadership... Stalin quite
rightly insisted that the military abandon outdated strategic concepts, but he
did not do so himself.as quickly as we would have liked.
Source: quoted in Roy Medvedev, Let HistoryJudge, pp. 768-9.

• \
(G) Stalin’s Order No. 227 - Not One More Step Backwards - 28 July 1942.
The enemy is creeping forward and breaking into the depths of the Soviet
Union, seizing new districts, laying waste to our towns and villages, raping,
looting and murdering the population. To retreat further would mean to
destroy ourselves and with us our Motherland.
Not one more step backwards! That has to be our main slogan from now on.
We will no longer tolerate officers and commissars, political personnel,
units and detachments abandoning their battle positions of their own free
will. We will no longer tolerate them allowing a few panic-mongers to deter
mine the position on the field of battle and to induce other fighters to retreat
and open the front to the enemy. Panic-mongers and cowards must be
destroyed on the spot. The retreat mentality must be decisively eliminated.
Army commanders who have allowed voluntary abandonment of positions
must be removed and sent to staff HQ for immediate trial by military tribunal.
Three to five well-armed detachments (up to 200 men each) should be formed
within an army and placed directly behind unreliable divisions and they must
be made to shoot the panic-mongers and cowards on the spot in the event of
panic and disorderly retreat.
Source: quoted in Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin, pp. 459-60.
(H) Nikita Khrushchev criticizes Stalin during his speech to the Twentieth Party
Congress, 25 February 1956. (For further extracts from the speech, see
Chapter 8, Document A.)
Stalin very energetically popularized himself as a great leader; he tried to

inculcate in the people the version that all victories gained by the Soviet
nation during the Great Patriotic War were due to the courage, daring and
genius of Stalin and to no-one else... Not Stalin, but the Party as a whole, the
Soviet government, our heroic army, its talented leaders and brave soldiers,
the whole Soviet nation - these are the ones who assured the victory in
the Great Patriotic War. [tempestuous and prolonged applause]
... Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious; we knew this from our
work with him. He could look at a man and say: ‘Why are your eyes so shifty
today?' or ‘Why are you turning so much today and avoiding to look me directly
in the eyes?' The sickly suspicion created in him a general distrust even
toward eminent party workers whom he had known for years. Everywhere and
in everything he saw ‘enemies', ‘two-facers' and ‘spies'...
It was determined that of the 139 members and candidates of the Party's
Central Committee who were elected at the 17th Congress, 98 persons -
70 per cent - were arrested and shot [indignation in the halt). The same fate
met the majority of the 17th Party Congress. Of the 1966 delegates, 1108 were
{continued)

arrested on charges of anti-revolutionary crimes. Now when the cases of some
of these;so-called spies and saboteurs were examined it was found that all their
cases were fabricated. Confessions of guilt of many arrested and charged with
enemy activity were gained with the help of cruel and inhuman tortures. The
vicious practice was condonèd of having the NKVD prepare lists of persons
whose sentences were prepared in advance. Yezhov would send these lists to
Stalin for his approval of the proposed punishment... Stalin was convinced
that this was necessary for the defence of the interests of the working class, in
the name of the defence of the Revolution’s gains. In this lies the whole tragedy!
Source: quoted in Stacey, pp. 58-9.
(I) Svetlana, Stalin's daughter, puts the blame on Beria.
Beria was a magnificent modem specimen of the artful courtier, the embodi
ment of Oriental perfidy, flattery and hypocrisy who had succeeded in con
founding even my father, a man whom it was ordinarily difficult to deceive.
A good deal that this monster did is now a blot on my father’s name, and in
a good many things they were guilty together. But I haven't the slightest doubt
that Beria used his cunning to trick my father into other things and laughed
up his sleeve about if afterwards. All the other leaders knew it...
But if a skilful flatterer like Beria whispered slyly in his ear that ‘these people
are against you,’ that there was ‘compromising material’ and ‘dangerous con
nections,’ such as trips abroad, my father was capable of believing it : 4fis
opinion of people could be manipulated. It became possible to insinuate that
so-and-so had turned out to be ‘no good.’ ‘Even though he'd been well
thought of for years, he only seemed to be all right. Actually, he’s an enemy.
He’s been saying bad things about you; he opposes you. X, Y and Z have given
evidence against him.’ What my father didn't want to realize was that in the
cellars of the secret police X, Y and Z could be made to testify to anything. That
was the domain of Beria, Yezhov and the other executioners, whom nature
had endowed with a special talent for that sort of thing.
Source: Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, pp. 15,74.
(J) Milovan Djilas, a leading member of the Yugoslav Communist Party, met
Stalin several times, and later recalled their conversations.
He pointed out the meaning of his pan-Slavic policy. ‘If the Slavs keep united
and maintain solidarity, no-one in the future will be able to move a finger. Not
even a finger!’ he repeated, emphasizing the thought by cleaving the air with
his forefinger. Someone expressed doubt that the Germans would be able to
recuperate within 50 years. But Stalin was of a different opinion. ‘No, they will
recover, and very quickly. Give them twelve to fifteen years and they’ll be on
their feet again. And this is why the unity of the Slavs is important.'
I V
338 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rûssian History
It is time something was said about Stalin's attitude to revolutions, and
thus to the Yugoslav revolution. Because Moscow had always refrained at the
crucial moment from supporting the Chinese, Spanish and in many ways even
the Yugoslav revolutions, the view prevailed, not without reason, that Stalin
was generally against revolutions. This is, however, not entirely correct. His
opposition was only conditional, and arose only when the revolution went
beyond the interests of the Soviet state. He felt instinctively that the creation
of revolutionary centres outside Moscow could endanger its supremacy in
world Communism, and of course that is what actually happened. That is why
he helped revolutions only up to a certain point - as long as he could control
them - but he was always ready to leave them in the lurch whenever they
slipped out of his grasp...
In his own country Stalin had subjected all activities to his views and to his
personality, so he could not behave differently outside... He could not act in
foreign affairs other than as a dictator. He became himself the slave of despot
ism, the bureaucracy, the narrowness, and the servility that he imposed on his
country.
Source: Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, pp. 90,103.
(K) Stalin’s reply to Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech, in an interview for Pravda,
13 March 1946.
I regard it [Churchill’s speech] as a dangerous move, calculated to sow the

seeds of dissension among the Allied states and impede their collaboration
... Mr Churchill now takes the stand of the warmongers, and he is not alone.
He has friends not only in Britain but in the United States as well. Mr Church
ill and his friends bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends. Hitler
began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that
only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation. Mr Churchill sets
out to unleash war with a race theory, asserting that only English-speaking
nations are superior nations... The English race theory leads Mr Churchill
and his friends to the conclusion that the English-speaking nations, as the
only superior nations, should rule over the rest of the nations of the world...
The following circumstances should not be forgotten. The Germans made
their invasion of the USSR through Finland, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and
Hungary. The Germans were able to make their invasion through these coun
tries because, at the time, governments hostile to the Soviet Union existed in
these countries. As a result of the German invasion the Soviet Union has lost
a total of about seven million people. In other words the Soviet Union’s loss
of life has been several times greater than that of Britain and the USA put
together. The Soviet Union cannot forget about them. And so what can there
be surprising about the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety,
is trying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union
(continued)

should exist in these countries? How can anyone, who has not taken leave of
his senses, describe these peaceful aspirations of the Soviet Union as expan
sionist tendencies on the part of our state?
Source: quoted in Martin McCauley, The Origins of the Cold War 1941-1949, pp. 133-4.
Notes
1. Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe,
1933-39, p. 52.
2. Nikolai Tolstoy, Stalin 's Secret War, p. 74.
3. Haslam, p. 59.
4. G. Roberts, The Soviet Union and the Origins o f the Second World War, p. 58.
5. Donald Cameron Watt, How'War Came, p. 232.
6. Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin - Parallel Lives, p. 731.
7. Martin Gilbert, Second World War, p. 197.
8. Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege o f Leningrad, p. 77. For more details about
the reports and Stalin’s interpretation of them, see pp. 55-81; also in John Erickson,
The Road to Stalingrad, pp. 77-142.
9. Tolstoy, pp. 160-1.
10. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 399.
11. H. Montgomery Hyde, Stalin: The History o f a Dictator, pp. 607-8; Salisbury, The 900
Days, p. 80.
13. Dmitri Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall o f the Soviet Empire, pp. 112-13. Unfortunately the
1995 collection of essays by Soviet historians, Gotovil li Stalin nastupatel'nuyu voinu
protiv Gitlera?[Was Stalin preparing a military offensive against Hitler?], edited by
GA Bordyugov, is not available in English. See also Gabriel Gorodetzky, Grand Delusion:
Stalin and the German Invasion o f Russia.
14. John Erickson, ’Barbarossa, June 1941: Who Attacked Whom?’, in History Today, July, 2001.
15. John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941-1945, p. 16.
16. Volkogonov, Stalin,p. 414. N
17. C. Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement, pp. 199-200.
18. The information in this section and the next is from Richard Overy, Russia's War, Martin
Gilbert, Second World War, and John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad.
19. Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad, p. 344.
20. Antony Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 141-2,148. Most of the information in this section is from
Beevor.
21. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege o f Leningrad, pp. 436-7.
22. Ibid., p. vii.
23. Gilbert, p. 441.
24. John Erickson, The Road to Berlin, p. 134. See pp. 115-180 for a detailed account of Kursk
and its aftermath.
25. Richard Overy, Russia's War, p. 247.
26. For a detailed account of the Warsaw rising see Erickson, The Road to Berlin, pp. 329-88.
27. Overy, p. 191.
28. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin, pp. 474,476.
29. Alec Nove, An Economic History o f the USSR, 1917-1991, p. 276.
30. E.T. Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin's Forced Labour System in the Light o f the Archives,
p. 144.
31. Overy, pp. 194-6.
32. Ibid., p. xxi.
33. Ibid., pp. 287-9.
I V
34. Nikolai Tolsoy, Stalin’s Secret War, chapter 17, for more details about the repatriations;
also Nicholas Bethell, The Last Secret: Forcible Repatriation to Russia, 1944-47.
35. Nove, pp. 294-330 for a detailed analysis of the economy during Stalin's last years.
36. Overy, pp. 313-16 for details of how the atomic bomb came to be developed. See also
D. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb.
37. N. Levin, Paradox o f Survival- The Jews o f the Soviet Union since 1917, pp. 393-4, 477-9,
512-24.
38. Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 519.
39. For a discussion of the theory that Zhdanov was murdered on Stalin's orders as a
preliminary to the purge of Leningrad leaders, and in an attempt to ‘wipe the Leningrad
epic out of public memory', see Harrison Salisbury, The 900Days: The Siege of Leningrad,
pp. 579-83.
40. D. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 207-11.
41. Volkogonov, Stalin, pp. 571-4. See also E. Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 549-58 for Stalin's death.
42. William A. Williams, The Tragedy o f American Diplomacy.
43. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins o f the Cold War, 1941-7.
44. Vojtech Mastny, Russia’s Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare and the Politics
o f Communism, 1941-1945.
45. Martin McCauley, The Origins o f the Cold War 1941-1949, pp. 106-8.
46. Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography, p. 761.
48. McCauley, pp. 70,108.
49. Richard Aldridge, The Hidden Hand.
50. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalinism: New Directions, p. 2.
54. Roy A. Medvedev, ‘New Pages from the Political Biography of Stalin', in Robert C. Tucker
(editor), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, p. 220.
55. Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, p. 704.
56. Robert C. Tucker (editor), Stalin: Essays, pp. x-xii; Tucker also provides the information
about Irina Pavlova whose work has not been translated into English.
57. Stephen F. Cohen, ‘Bolshevism and Stalinism’, in Robert C. Tucker (editor), Stalin: Essays
in Historical Interpretation, p. 12.
■ u 8 The Khrushchev era and
de-Stalinization, 19 5 3 -6 4
Summary of events
After Stalin's death in 1953 it seemed at first that there was going to be a collective
leadership exercised by a group of his closest colleagues. However, Nikita
Khrushchev gradually emerged as the dominant figure, cleverly outmanoeuvring
his rivals, rather like Stalin did after the death of Lenin. Khrushchev believed that
Stalin had derailed Lenin’s revolution and he was determined to discredit Stalin
and reform the distorted system which he had left behind. In February 1956 he
delivered his sensational de-Stalinization speech, accusing Stalin of developing
'the cult of personality* and diminishing the role of the party.
Khrushchev was mainly responsible for the introduction of some new, more
radical policies described by some historians as 'the Khrushchev revolution*:
• The end of Stalin's system of terror.

• A more relaxed attitude towards the eastern bloc countries.
• An attempt to develop better relations with non-communist states - co-existence
instead of conflict.
• Attempts to strengthen the Soviet economy by de-centralizing and streamlining
agriculture, industry and the bureaucracy, in order to improve the standard of
living of the Soviet people; his Seven-Year Plan, introduced in 1959, was one of
his most ambitious innovations.
• A thaw in the cultural life of the USSR.
Khrushchev pursued all these policies with determination and enthusiasm and
achieved some successes, most notably in the industrial parts of the Seven-Year
Plan. Other aspects of his policies were much less successful; his agricultural
reforms were disappointing, while his more relaxed attitude towards the Soviet
satellite states caused problems in Poland and especially Hungary, where in 1956
there was a popular uprising against the communist government. Although there
was something of a thaw in Soviet relations with the West, the USSR came to the
brink of nuclear war with the USA in 1962 over the Cuban missiles crisis, and
a bitter rift developed between the USSR and the world's other major communist
state, China. These and other considerations caused Khrushchev’s colleagues to
drop him as leader in October 1964, and he was forced to retire into private life.
i \
• Why did Khrushchev deliver his ‘Stalin Speech*?

• How original was Khrushchev as a leader?
• Did he achieve anything positive or did all his policies fail?
8.1 The rise of Khrushchev and the attack on

Stalin, 1953-57
(a) The power struggle after Stalin’s death
In many ways the situation immediately after Stalin’s death was similar to that
after Lenin’s death in January 1924: neither Lenin nor Stalin had named a suc
cessor or left any instructions as to what should be done; at first there was a
collective leadership exercised by Stalin’s closest colleagues, but this quickly
developed into a power struggle. Like Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev seemed the
least likely candidate to become supreme leader, and his rivals underestimated
him. He was bom in 1894 in Kalnikovka, a village in Kursk province in southern
Russia, close to the Ukrainian border. His parents were poor peasants and he
had very little education beyond the normal four years in the village school. He
worked first of all as a shepherd, then on the railways and in a brick factory
before going into the mining industry. He served his apprenticeship as a metal
fitter in the Donbass and was exempt from military service during the First
World War because of the importance of the coal industry for the war effort. By
October 1917 he was head of his local metalworkers’ union; it was at a union
conference that he first met Lazar Kaganovitch, who later brought him to
Stalin’s notice. Khrushchev joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and was a Red Army
commissar during the Civil War. During the 1920s he lived in Ukraine where he
gradually rose through the party network. Returning to Moscow in the early
1930s, he attended courses at the Industrial Academy and by 1935 he was secret
ary of the Moscow party. He was completely loyal to Stalin and played his part in
purging the Moscow party. In 1938 he moved to Ukraine again as first party sec
retary and carried out more purges; he was made a full member of the Politburo
in 1939, no doubt as a reward for his labours. During the war he was a political
commissar in the Red Army and fought at Stalingrad. In 1949 Stalin made him
Central Committee Secretary with special responsibility for agriculture, but his
work in that sphere was not especially successful. At the time of Stalin’s death he
was regarded by his colleagues as hardworking and enthusiastic, but not as one
to be taken seriously as a contender for power. He was friendly, talkative and
open, and seemed not in the least devious; he often drank too much vodka and
acted the fool at the late-night gatherings in Stalin's dacha. It was easy to dismiss
him as a cheerful nonentity; but in reality he was highly intelligent, ambitious,
self-confident, courageous, and ruthless when necessary. By February 1956 when
he delivered his famous ‘Stalin Speech', he had succeeded in outmanoeuvring
all his rivals.
The Khrushchev era 343

The other main contenders were Georgi Malenkov, Stalin's favourite, so far as
he ever had one, Lavrenti Beria, the former NKVD chief, who had slipped out of
favour with Stalin, but clearly had ambitions for supreme power, and Vyasheslav
Molotov, the former long-serving Foreign Minister. Within the first few days the
leading jobs were distributed: Malenkov emerged with the posts of Chairman of
the Council of Ministers and first secretary of the Communist Party Central Com
mittee. This made him head of both the government and the party, the positions
held by Stalin. Beria became head of the MVD (the new title of the NKVD) and
Minister of the Interior, and Molotov was made Foreign Minister, while Khrush
chev, although a member of the Presidium, was not given a top position. Other
members of the Presidium (as the Politburo had been called since 1952) were
Nikolai Bulganin, Lazar Kaganovitch, Anastas Mikoyan and Kliment Voroshilov.
However, Malenkov's opponents on the Presidium, led by Khrushchev, soon
began to protest; later in March they insisted that he should relinquish one of his
posts and he decided to give up the secretariat, thinking that the Chair of the
Council of Ministers would carry the greater authority; the secretariat was given
to Khrushchev, which made him in effect the head of the party.
Malenkov and Beria had been allies for a long time, and made a formidable
partnership; many of their ideas were adopted during the first few weeks. Beria in
particular was anxious to introduce reforms: it was time to bring an end to the
terror policy; an amnesty was declared for political prisoners and the first
batches of the 2.5 million labour camp inmates were released, including Molotov’s
wife; the doctors who had been arrested and put on trial were rehabilitated; Beria
announced that he wanted to follow a more relaxed policy towards the non-
Russian nationalities and the Soviet bloc countries, and improve relatiofts-with
Yugoslavia. However, Dmitri Volkogonov believes that any claims that Beria was
a 'frustrated reformer' must be taken with a pinch of salt Although he had ideas
for changing the system, Volkogonov is convinced that none of them would have
been fundamental, and that any idea that Beria was a genuine reformer is 'simply
wrong-headed.’1
The first major disagreement came over East Germany: Beria wanted a united,
neutral Germany, but Khrushchev was against reunification which he saw as dan
gerous to the USSR. Molotov agreed with Khrushchev - the German Democratic
Republic (GDR) should be kept as a separate socialist state. However, they all
agreed that moves towards socialism must take place gradually and cautiously,
and that attempts must be made to reduce political tension. The GDR government
was trying to introduce the full range of socialist policies as rapidly as possible -
rather too rapidly for the liking of the industrial workers. In June 1953 there were
strikes and demonstrations on the streets of Berlin and the situation seemed
about to get out of hand; the Presidium decided that order must be restored, and
Soviet tanks rolled in to crush the uprising. The events in Germany undermined
Beria: it was a good excuse to blame his liberal ideas for encouraging the protests;
also his was the overall responsibility for security throughout the Soviet bloc. By
this time Khrushchev was becoming increasingly suspicious of Bella's inten
tions; he was obviously trying to build up a base of support in the non-Russian
republics and was gradually increasing the power of the government apparatus
over the party. His control of tl\e MVD gave Beria enormous power - he had under
i '
his control several hundred thousand security troops as well as the ordinary
police and border guards, plus some tanks and a small air force.
Khrushchev managed to persuade Malenkov, Molotov and Bulganin, one-
by-one, that they were all in danger from Beria and that he must be arrested. They
had the support of Marshall Zhukov, who was a particular admirer of Khrushchev
because of his contribution during the war, and of many other generals who
hated Beria and his secret police. Rumours began to circulate that Beria was pre
paring to surround Moscow with his troops as a preliminary to carrying out
a coup.2 This brought added urgency to die situation, and it was decided to
arrest Beria at a Presidium meeting on 26 June. Malenkov acted as chairman and
he soon handed over to Khrushchev who launched a fatal attack on Beria: T have
formed the impression that he is no Communist,’ he said.4He is a careerist who
has wormed his way into the party for self-seeking reasons. His arrogance is
intolerable. No honest Communist would ever behave as he does in the party.’
He went on to accuse him of preparing to seize power and of acting as an agent
for the British. Beria was stunned and could only mutter incoherently; before he
had the presence of mind to alert his bodyguards, Malenkov gave a pre-arranged
signal, bringing Zhukov and a group of officers into the room. They arrested Beria
and took him away to a secret location, successfully evading the MVD troops
surrounding the Kremlin. Regular army troops were moved in to replace them
and they took control of the MVD building. Khrushchev, with the support of a
majority of the Presidium and the army, had outwitted Beria, who had thought
himself unassailable. Together with six of his secret police associates, Beria was
tried in secret, found guilty and executed in December 1953. Although it was not
generally realized at the time, the fall of Beria marked an important turning point
in Soviet politics: Khrushchev and the rest had mellowed since the bad old days
before the war, and had had enough of terror and purges; there was a feeling of
enormous relief that Beria was out of the way and that the secret police would
never again be used against members of the ruling group. Power struggles were
no longer going to be life-and-death affairs in which the losers were executed.
The new atmosphere meant that there could be open policy debates in the
Presidium for the first time since the 1920s. The main bone of contention was
over economic strategy; they all agreed that the most pressing need was to improve
the standard of living - more food, more consumer goods, more incentives for
farmers and industrial workers. One of their first reforms was to reduce the taxes
on peasants by 50 per cent. Malenkov’s idea - his ‘New Course’ - was to reduce
expenditure on armaments and heavy industry and spend more on producing
consumer goods. To increase food production he advocated the use of more
mechanization and chemical fertilizers. Khrushchev argued that the quickest
way to raise living standards was to provide more food, and that this could best
be done by increasing the area under cultivation. He pointed out that there was
plenty of uncultivated virgin land in the Volga area, southern Siberia, the Urals
and Kazakhstan, and that the initial costs of bringing new land into cultivation
would be recouped in three years, enabling the military budget to remain as
before. Although Malenkov’s ideas were more radical, the government decided
to adopt Khrushchev's virgin land scheme. The 1953 harvest had been disap
pointing, and although the weather rather than Malenkov was to blame for this,

his reputation suffered. In the spring of 1954 millions of acres of new land were
developed and the weather was kind to Khrushchev - the 1954 grain harvest was
a record one. Pravda switched its support to Khrushchev in January 1955, and by
February he had rallied enough support to force Malenkov's resignation as Chair
man of the Council of Ministers. Although Malenkov was defeated, he still remained
a member of the Presidium and one of the four deputy prime ministers, and was
made Minister of Power Stations. Marshall Bulganin, a close ally of Khrushchev,
was promoted to be Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or prime minister,
which made him head of the government. This meant that Khrushchev was not
in complete control, but as the chief secretary of the party he was able to build up
the party apparatus as his power base. He appointed officials who were loyal to
him, many of whom had worked for him in Ukraine and Moscow.3 By the time of
the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 he had revived much of the power
of the party which had dwindled during the years of Stalin’s dictatorship. With
the help of his close allies on the Presidium he was usually able to get his way.
(b) Khrushchev, the ‘secret speech’ and

de-Stalinization
On 25 February 1956 Khrushchev electrified and stunned a closed session of the
Congress with a four-hour speech criticizing Stalin (Document A). A few days
earlier Mikoyan had already caused a commotion by talking about ‘wrongly
declared enemies of the people’ and claiming that under Stalin ‘a cult of person
ality flourished.’ Perhaps he was testing audience reaction for Khrushchev; but
nothing he said could have prepared the Congress for the sensational revelations
Khrushchev was about to make. He told them about Lenin’s advice in 1923 to
remove Stalin from his post of Party General Secretary, and about the repressions,
tortures, false confessions and wrongful executions of the 1930s. He gave them
lists of names of perfectly innocent party members who had suffered at the
hands of Stalin. Not only was Stalin a murderer, he was also an incompetent
blunderer who had almost led his country to defeat by being unprepared for
Hitler’s invasion. He scoffed at the image Stalin had invented for himself as a
great war hero and he revealed Stalin’s errors of strategy. He gave full details of
the deportations during the war, the Leningrad Affair and the imaginary Doctors’
Plot, and criticized Stalin’s handling of the eastern bloc states. The speech was
frequently interrupted by gasps of dismay and disbelief, and several people
fainted from shock. He condemned ‘the cult of personality’ introduced by Stalin
and accused him of destroying party democracy; he pointed out that there had
been a gap of 13 years between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Party Congresses,
and the Politburo had hardly met at all. Significantly, no criticisms were made of
anything that had happened before 1934 - such as the horrors of collectivization
and the less successful aspects of the First Five-Year Plan - otherwise the whole
concept of the Soviet planned economy would have been called into question.
Nor was there any reference to the millions of ordinary people who had suffered
during the purges, and Khrushchev was careful to point out that he had not been
a member of the Politburo until 1939 when the purges were over. Although the
text of the speech was not published in full in the USSR until 1989, the general gist
I V

of what Khrushchev had said soon spread around the country, and translations
found their way into the hands of foreign journalists. There can be no doubt that
it was one of the most remarkable events in the whole of Soviet history. It pro
duced mixed emotions in the USSR; there was dismay among many people that
the image of their hero had been destroyed, and in Tbilisi, the capital of Stalin's
native Georgia, there were protest riots. Among others, there was relief that at
last the truth had been confronted and exorcised. There was a general feeling
that the political atmosphere was more relaxed, and people felt able to talk about
politics again in public. In the Lenin-Stalin mausoleum, the holy of holies of the
Soviet regime, visitors were overheard muttering curses at Stalin.4
Why did Khrushchev make this attack on Stalin, which was a risky step to take
bearing in mind that he and most of his colleagues owed their positions to Stalin
and had gone along with his worst excesses without protest? He had difficulty
persuading the Presidium that it was the right thing to do; the more conservative
members - Molotov, Kaganovitch and Voroshilov - were strongly against it, but
with the support of the younger members, Khrushchev secured the approval of
the Presidium to appoint a commission to investigate and report on Stalin's
activities. It was only towards the end of the Congress that the decision was taken
to deliver the speech, and that was on condition that as much as possible of the
blame was deflected from the Presidium on to Beria. The problem for the govern
ment was that sooner or later something would have to be said about the Stalin
question, because of the increasing number of labour camp inmates who were
being released. The innocent victims of Stalin’s purges, many of whom had been
in the camps for 20 years and who would have to be released eventually, would
soon be talking about the repressions and the Gulag. Khrushchev genuinely
believed that the truth about Stalin's crimes would have to come out, and that it
was better if the party took the initiative itself and confronted the issue before it
was forced to do so by public pressure. Having secured his colleagues' support with
this argument, Khrushchev used his opportunity cleverly for his own political
ends: without blaming them overtly for the bloodletting, nevertheless by emphas
izing that he only joined the Politburo in 1939, and carefully omitting to mention
his own role in the Moscow and Ukrainian purges, he gave the clear impression that
his seniors - Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovitch and Voroshilov - were infinitely
more responsible than he was. Publicly condemning Stalin’s behaviour in this
way made it pretty certain that no future leader would attempt to imitate him.
Another probable motive for the speech is that Khrushchev genuinely felt that
Stalin and his system had held up progress by stifling initiative; he wanted to get
things back on the track that Lenin would have followed. In the words of Martin
McCauley: 'Breaking the spell of psychological subservience to Stalin was the
only way to release the pent-up creative energies of the people. The party would
assume the task of guiding all these talents into productive channels, thus opening
up exciting prospects for party functionaries and members. Khrushchev saw
himself as the conductor of the whole enterprise: he sought Stalin’s power but he
wished to use it responsibly and humanely. He wanted to rule as Lenin would have
done in a period of internal stability, as an enlightened dictator.'5 Khrushchev's
speech therefore began the process of de-Stalinization, although the phrase was
not used at the time in the USSR; the leadership preferred to call it ‘the attack on

the cult of the individual/ This meant that Khrushchev had to tread a very fine
line: he wanted Stalin’s power, yet if he acted too much like a dictator he would
lay himself open to similar charges. Nevertheless, over the next few months some
remarkable changes took place. The labour camps began to empty and many
people were rehabilitated; more freedom was allowed in the world of culture; in
science, theories and disciplines which had been banned under Stalin were
rehabilitated, the most recent developments in Western science were allowed
into the USSR, and Khrushchev was keen to make use of the latest technology.
Cybernetics and management science began to develop. There were new policies
in industry and agriculture; managers were urged to be self-critical and to be
willing to try new ideas; some of the more conservative Ministries were criticized
for their ’inertia and stagnation which inflicts considerable damage on the state/
There were new initiatives in foreign policy, with Khrushchev calling for peaceful
co-existence with the West, and a more relaxed attitude towards the eastern bloc
countries; in April 1956 the tominform, which had been an irritation to the
USSR’s partners since its creation, was dissolved. Khrushchev blamed Stalin for
mishandling relations with Yugoslavia and did his best to heal the breach
between the two countries. He twice visited Tito in Belgrade and Tito paid
a return visit to Moscow in June 1956. Kaganovich was dropped from the Council
of Ministers, and on 2 June, the same day that Tito arrived in Moscow, Molotov
was replaced as Foreign Minister by Dmitri Shepilov.
(c) Trouble in the eastern bloc

The new policies carried dangers for Khrushchev and the party: people wejre not
certain how far the changes were intended to go; was Khrushchev aiming for
genuine liberalization? The first real crisis occurred in the eastern bloc states
where people interpreted de-Stalinization as meaning more political freedom. If
Stalin had been discredited, surely that meant that his puppets should go too. In
June 1956 trouble flared up in Poland where, in Poznan, workers ôrganized
a general strike and held protest demonstrations against poor living standards,
declining wages and high taxes. The Polish government used troops to suppress
the violence, but tensions remained high throughout the summer and came to
a head in October when Gomulka, the Polish communist leader who had been
imprisoned on Stalin's orders, was elected to the Polish Politburo. Khrushchev
flew to Warsaw, taking with him Mikoyan, Molotov and Kaganovitch, while
Soviet troops in Poland were placed on alert; Warsaw was surrounded by Russian
tanks. After difficult negotiations, a compromise was reached: the Poles were
allowed more control over their domestic affairs, Gomulka was appointed First
Secretary of the Communist Party, and in return the Poles promised to remain in
the Warsaw Pact and to go along with the USSR in foreign affairs. Relations
between the two states continued reasonably smoothly, though Stalin would not
have approved of the Polish version of communism. For example, only about ten
per cent of Polish farmland was ever collectivized. By presenting a united front
and being prepared for reasonable compromise, the Polish communists won
control of their own internal affairs, avoided bloodshed and preserved the unity
of the eastern bloc.
348 Mastering Twentieth-Century ftu^sian History

The Hungarians were less fortunate. At the time of Stalin’s death, the Hungarian
leader was the pro-Stalin Matyas Rakosi, who had plunged the country into rapid
Stalinization policies, including a collectivization drive which was almost as
disastrous as the one in the USSR. Some 2000 people had been executed and
about 200,000 put into prisons and concentration camps. The new Soviet leaders
severely reprimanded Rakosi for his excesses and replaced him with Imry Nagy,
a more moderate, reform-minded Communist. Rakosi and his supporters refused
to be sidelined and in March 1955 Nagy was overthrown and Rakosi reinstated
as leader. With the news of Gomulka's victory in Poland, Hungarian resentment
exploded in a full-scale rising on 23 October 1956. Nagy was brought back as
prime minister, and the popular Roman Catholic Cardinal Mindszenty, who had
been under house arrest for six years for his outspoken anti-communist views,
was released.6Nagy managed to negotiate a cease-fire which led to the withdrawal
of a detachment of Soviet troops which had been vainly trying to restore order
in Budapest He made several other concessions to the insurgents, abolishing
the one-party system and taking some non-communists into a new coalition
government. Even this did not calm the tension and it seemed as though the
government was on the point of collapse.
This placed the Soviet leadership in a dilemma: Nagy had already broken one
main Leninist tenet by agreeing to a multi-party system, and even that was not
enough for the insurgents. How much further was Nagy prepared to go? The
Presidium agonized about whether or not to intervene; Khrushchev was strongly
in favour of military action, arguing that if things were allowed to take their
course, ‘we would have capitalists on the frontiers of the Soviet Union... We
cannot possibly permit it, either as Communists and internationalists or as the
Soviet state.’ Mikoyan was the main supporter of non-intervention and threat
ened to commit suicide if armed force was used. There is no doubt that the Soviet
leaders would have preferred not to intervene, but the majority genuinely
believed that the entire eastern bloc would be severely weakened if things were
allowed to go any further in Hungary. In the meantime, Khrushchev explained
their thinking to the other eastern bloc leaders, including Tito; all agreed that
intervention should take place. On 31 October the Soviet troops which had just
withdrawn from Budapest were therefore ordered to take up positions around
tiie capital again, and more troops entered Hungary from Ukraine. Nagy protested
strongly at these moves, arguing that they would only inflame the situation.
When he got no satisfaction from the Soviet ambassador in Budapest, Nagy
announced that Hungary was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact and would
become a neutral power. He appealed to the United Nations to help Hungary
preserve its independence. This was the final straw for the Soviet leaders; even
Janos Kadar, the leader of the Hungarian Communist Party and a member of
Nagy’s government, knew that he had overstepped the mark. Some sources
claim that Tito played a vital part in what happened next; Nagy was invited to
seek asylum in the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest, while Kadar became head of
a new provisional government which requested Soviet intervention.7
On 4 November Soviet troops went into action; the Hungarians resisted
bravely, but against Soviet tanks their defeat was only a matter of time. Casualties
were high - some estimates put them at 20,000 Hungarians killed, with another

20,000 arrested; thousands fled the country and escaped to the West. Kadar was
installed as the new Hungarian leader, and he stayed in power until 1988. About
300 people were executed, including Nagy, although he had been promised
a safe conduct. The Soviet action in Hungary deeply shocked the West, where
many observers had thought that de-Stalinization meant a general liberalizing
of Soviet policies. It was clear now that there were strict limits to Soviet toler
ation; the USSR had every intention of using its military power whenever it
felt its security was threatened. Khrushchev defended Soviet intervention in
Hungary vigorously; he genuinely believed that Nagy had turned into a counter
revolutionary who simply had to be stopped before the infection spread to the
rest of the eastern bloc. It was unfortunate for Khrushchev that the vision of
Soviet tanks and troops crushing freedom fighters in Budapest rather dented his
image of the new peaceful USSR. The West for its part had done nothing to help
Nagy, beyond condemning Soviet action. The fact that Britain and France had
just themselves intervened, unsuccessfully, in Egypt, spoiled any attempt they
might have made to take the moral high ground.
(d) Khrushchev in crisis

By the spring of 1957 Khrushchev's opponents were gathering themselves
together for an attack. He was blamed for the events in Poland and Hungary, but
what really upset some of his colleagues was the announcement of his new
economic policies in February 1957; these involved, among other things, a rad
ical reorganization of the central industrial ministries, which seemed to be
a deliberate challenge to the most conservative forces in the bureaucracy (see next
section). The opposition to Khrushchev was organized by Malenkov, Molotov
and Kaganovitch; they were not themselves in agreement about everything - in
fact Molotov and Malenkov were not on good terms with each other; what united
them was that they each opposed some area or other of Khrushchev's policies,
but most importantiy they were all afraid of Khrushchev’s ambitions. He seemed
intent on increasing his own power, and was taking more and more important
decisions without any consultation; they suspected that he was planning to oust
them from the Presidium and replace them with his own supporters, five of
whom were candidate members of the Presidium. While Khrushchev was away
on a visit to Finland, they decided to strike first, and persuaded Bulganin and
Voroshilov to support them.
As soon as he returned from Finland Khrushchev was summoned to a meeting
of the Presidium (18 June 1957). The conspirators had a majority, since three
members who could be expected to support Khrushchev were away at other
meetings or on holiday. They immediately launched a bitter attack on Khrush
chev, criticizing his ‘cult of personality,' his conduct of foreign affairs and the
way in which he insisted on interfering with everybody and everything. If they
expected Khrushchev to crumble under this sudden onslaught, they were very
much mistaken; he defended himself with spirit and hit back at Malenkov, accus
ing him of being responsible for the deaths of innocent people in the Leningrad
affair. The meeting proposed to abolish the position of First Secretary, the post
held by Khrushchev, who was to be demoted to the position of Minister of
350 Mastering Twentieth-Century1Russian History

Agriculture. However, Khrushchev demanded that all the Presidium members and
candidate members should be present, together with all the Central Committee
Secretaries. He was supported by Mikoyan, Leonid Brezhnev and, most import
antly, Zhukov, who controlled the armed forces; the conspirators dared not go
ahead without his approval. A second meeting was held the following day, this
time attended by the full Presidium and Secretariat, but there was still a majority
of full Presidium members against Khrushchev. Still he would not give up; he
reminded the meeting that every Central Committee member had the right to be
present at Presidium meetings and argued that the fairest way to settle the issues
was to call a full plenary session of the Central Committee. His opponents,
confident of having a majority in the Central Committee as well, agreed to
Khrushchev's proposal, and the session opened on 22 June. The Khrushchev
camp had prepared their campaign meticulously; Zhukov and Brezhnev concen
trated on discrediting the conspirators for their roles in the purges; statistics
were produced to show the number of executions sanctioned by Molotov and
Kaganovitch. Then Mikoyan revealed how the anti-Khrushchev group had been
trying to limit the role of the Central Committee, and he accused them of being
an ‘anti-party group.’ The opposition had begun to fall apart even before
Khrushchev spoke; only Molotov put up a strong performance in his own
defence. The final demolition was carried out by Khrushchev who made the big
three look even more guilty than Stalin. He reserved his most scathing attack for
Malenkov, placing him on a par with Beria and calling them ‘the two evil
geniuses;’ he accused them of taking advantage of their ageing leader, who was
out of touch with events and cut off from his people, and of manipulating him
shamelessly for their own ends.
It was a wonderful team performance and it ended in a sweeping victory for
Khrushchev. The Central Committee expressed full confidence in him as First
Secretary, and condemned the anti-party group. Malenkov, Molotov and
Kaganovitch were removed from the Presidium and the Central Committee, but
to show how much things had changed since Stalin's time, they were not
arrested. They were, however, spectacularly demoted, not without a touch of
humour Molotov was appointed as ambassador to Outer Mongolia, Kaganovitch
was made manager of a cement works in Sverdlovsk and Malenkov was sent to
look after power stations in Central Asia. Bulganin was left in his post as prime
minister for the time being. A new Presidium was elected which was full of
Khrushchev supporters and included Leonid Brezhnev who was later to play
a leading role in Soviet politics. Zhukov became a full Presidium member and
Minister of Defence, the first professional soldier to rise to a top position in the
party. Khrushchev was soon in disagreement with Zhukov over a number of
policy issues, particularly over the relationship between the party and the army.
Zhukov wanted to reduce the party's control over the army, but this was un
acceptable to Khrushchev, who suspected that Zhukov might try and seize power
for himself in a military coup. In October 1957 Zhukov was sent on an official visit
to Albania and Yugoslavia; while he was away it was announced that he had been
replaced as Defence Minister by Marshal Malinovsky, and he was removed from
the Presidium. Disgusted at this treatment after all he had done to keep Khrushchev
in power, Zhukov retired into private life and concentrated on writing his memoirs.

To complete the consolidation of his power, in March 1958 Khrushchev removed
Bulganin and became prime minister himself. He was now head of the party and
the government, he had the support of a majority of the Presidium and the party
Central Committee, and the army and the police were fully under his control.
Although he was not exactly a dictator in the way Stalin had been —he still needed
the approval of his colleagues - he was certainly the most powerful politician in
the USSR, and remained so until October 1964.
8.2 Problems and new policies

(a) Agriculture
One of the most serious problems left behind by Stalin was the state of Soviet
agriculture. The simple fact was that collectivization had come nowhere near
achieving the ambitious targets which Stalin had set for it. Soon after Stalin’s
death Khrushchev told the Supreme Soviet the truth about Soviet farming, reveal
ing details which had been kept secret for years. Ever since the introduction of
collectivization, grain stocks had been lower than under Nicholas II; productivity
was much too low; livestock herds were fewer than in 1928; peasants were paid
too little and taxed too highly, so that they had no incentive to produce more,
and the whole of agriculture was too bureaucratic. This would all be put right in
the next two to three years.8 Because of his peasant background Khrushchev
considered himself an expert on agricultural matters. He toured round the coun
tryside to meet peasants and talk to them in language which they understood,
something which no previous Russian ruler had taken the trouble to do. One of
his great contributions to agricultural policy was to persuade his colleagues that
agriculture needed much more investment than ever before. He also realized
that it was too centralized and that decisions needed to be made and carried out
at local level; he urged that agricultural specialists and officials were'fceeded on
the spot in the countryside instead of sitting in offices hundreds of miles away. In
1957 even the USSR Ministry of Agriculture was moved from Moscow into
premises on a sovkhoz (state collective farm) 70 miles from the capital.
Thanks to Khrushchev the state began to pay the peasants higher prices for
their grain, their taxes were greatly reduced, and so were some of the procurement
quotas, which left the collectives with more surpluses for private sale; for the first
time they were brought into the social security system. The machine tractor
stations (MTS) which had been built as part of the collectivization drive were
disbanded, the tractors were sold to the collective farms, and the stations were
used as repair depots. All this gave peasants greater incentive, and between 1953
and 1958 their average income more than doubled. One of Khrushchev’s favour
ite ideas was the amalgamation of smaller kolkhozy to form larger units - the
larger the unit, the greater the productivity, or so he thought. By 1967 the number
of kolkhozy (collective farms) had fallen to just over 36,000, each including, on
average, 418 households. The numbers of sovkhozy (state-owned collectives)
had increased to almost 13,000, mainly because the virgin lands were organized
as sovkhozy; the average sovkhoz was twice the size of the average kolkhoz.
i \
These large collectives came in for criticism on the grounds that they were much
too large, so that the individual was lost in a huge impersonal rural conurbation.
Krushchev's most famous project was the virgin lands scheme, carried into
operation by tens of thousands of young volunteers, many of them from Kom
somol. In the first three years some 36 million hectares of new land were brought
under cultivation and the government provided over one hundred thousand
tractors. Between 1953 and 1958 the new policies brought dramatic improvements
in performance, largely because of the initial impact of the virgin lands scheme
and some good weather. Total agricultural output more or less doubled during
that period; grain output, which had averaged about 80 million tonnes in the years
1949-53, increased to an average of 110 million tonnes during 1954-58. Livestock
numbers increased steadily: catde numbers rose from 56 million to about 67 million
and pigs from 28.5 million to 44 million. Output of meat and milk increased in
roughly similar proportions.9 These successes were extremely encouraging and
contributed towards a steady increase in the standard of living.
It was after the bumper harvest of 1958 that things began to go wrong. Critics
of Khrushchev within the party complained that there was too much investment
in agriculture at the expense of other branches of the economy. Now that the
virgin lands scheme was well under way, they argued, state investment should be
reduced. Khrushchev found it difficult to resist their demands, and consequently
the supply of vital agricultural machinery such as combine harvesters, seeders,
mowers and trucks dwindled. Khrushchev tried to offset the effects of the invest
ment slowdown by introducing new techniques and cropping patterns. On one
of his visits to the USA he had seen huge plains of maize growing and he decided
to experiment with it in the USSR, for use mainly as cattle fodder. Unfortunately
the idea was carried to excess in some areas, where farms stopped growing crops
such as rye and oats and changed to maize. By 1963, as the 'maize mania' took
hold, the area growing rye had been reduced by a quarter and that growing oats
by almost two-thirds. But in many of these areas - especially in Kazakhstan - the
soil and climate were not suitable for maize, and the crop was so poor that it was
hardly worth harvesting. Another idea was to farm land more intensively, plough
ing up grass and fallow land to grow wheat every year, instead of alternating it.
This was possible with the use of the right chemical fertilizers, but unfortunately
these were not available in sufficient quantities. In the drive to maximize production
Khrushchev adopted what seemed a rather petty policy of attacking the peas
ants' private plots and launched a campaign to 'persuade' peasants to sell their
cows to the kolkhoz; peasants were required to work more hours at a time when
their pay was getting less. All this only irritated peasants who responded in their
usual way - by being unco-operative.
Some agrarian experts advocated early sowing of wheat, arguing that this
would offset the risk of losing a late-sown crop if there was an early autumn frost.
However, other experts warned that early sowing carried greater risk of soil erosion
and weed infestation, and urged Khrushchev to stick to late sowing. Khrushchev
went for early sowing which, by 1962, was being used extensively in the virgin
lands areas. Sadly, he had backed the wrong horse - the warnings proved well-
founded: there was massive weed infestation which choked the crops, and in
1963 there was a drought which dried out the soil in the virgin lands regions. The

354
M astering
Twentieth-Century Russian History
Figure 8.1 Khrushchev showing o ff the fruits o f his maize campaign in Kazakhstan, 1961.
harvest that year was a disaster and worse still, millions of hectares of land were
lost through wind erosion. The early sowing technique could have worked, but it
needed adequate supplies of weed-killer and careful irrigation and fertilization
to safeguard against soil erosion; none of these measures had been taken, mainly
because of the huge expense that would have been involved. The grain output
was almost one-third less than that of the previous year and there was a looming
food and fodder shortage. Many livestock were slaughtered because of the fodder
shortage; for instance, numbers of pigs fell from over 70 million to only 41 million.
The failure also showed up other weaknesses of the agricultural system: there
were insufficient drying and storage facilities for crops, and the road system was
poor; often the crops which had been harvested rotted before they could be dis
tributed. This was the legacy of years of under-investment in agriculture, and it
could only be put right by a massive state investment programme. Khrushchev
was well aware of this, but it was only in late 1963, after the failure of the harvest,
that he managed to persuade his colleagues to finance a programme to increase
output of fertilizers and weed-killers. The problem was always the same - the
demands of agriculture constantly had to be weighed against the requirements
of defence and heavy industry. The ultimate humiliation for Khrushchev was that
20 million tonnes of grain had to be imported from the USA and Australia in
order to prevent the food shortage turning into a famine. In October 1961 he had
boasted at the Twenty-Second Party Congress that the USSR would soon over
take the USA in production per head of the population (Document B). The failure
of the 1963 harvest was a severe blow to Khrushchev's prestige and one which
contributed to his downfall in October 1964.
(b) Industry
Khrushchev's most radical step in general economic policy was to try to decentralize
the administration. He believed that the ministries in Moscow had become over
staffed and stagnant; they showed no initiatives and seemed out of touch with
local conditions and needs. In 1957 the central ministries were broken up and
replaced by 105 regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy) which, it was hoped,
because of their local knowledge, would be more efficient and dynamic. The
Sixth Five-Year Plan, started in 1955, was abandoned within a year because of
over-ambitious targets, and in 1959 a Seven-Year Plan was introduced, which
aimed to increase the supply of consumer goods, chemicals and plastics. There
can be no doubt that there were considerable economic achievements (apart from
the grain harvest), as the statistics on the next page, provided by Alec Nove, show.10
Many changes beneficial to the workers were introduced: wage increases,
a minimum wage, tax cuts on low incomes, price reductions on some manufac
tured goods, a shorter working week (reduced from 48 hours to 46 in 1956 and to
41 in 1960), a seven-hour day with six hours on a Saturday, a minimum of four
weeks' holiday for workers under 18 and an increase of paid maternity leave to
112 days. A very popular move was the great increases in pensions and disability
benefits, and the abolition of all tuition fees in secondary and higher education.
In 1958 the trade union committees in the factories were given more powers and
responsibilities.

1958 Planfor 1965 Actual 1965figure
National income 100 162-165 158

Producers’ goods 100 185-188 196
Consumers' goods 100 162-165 160
Iron ore (million tons) 88.8 150-160 153.4
Steel (million tons) 54.9 86-91 91
Coal (million tons) 493 600-612 578
Oil (million tons) 113 230-240 242.9
Gas (thousand million 29.9 150 129.3
cubic metres)
Electricity (thousand 235 500-520 507
million kWhs)
Mineral fertilizer 12 35 31.6
(million tons)
Synthetic fibres 166 666 407
(thousand tons)
Machine tools (thousands) 138 190-200 185
Tractors (thousands) 220 - 355
Cement (million tons) 33.3 75-81 72.4
Wool fabrics (million 303 485 365
square metres)
Leather footware 356.4 515 486
(million pairs)
Grain harvest (million tons) 134.7 164-180 121.1
Meat (total) (million tons) 3.37 6.13 N 5.25
Housing (million 71.2 650-660 79.2
square metres)
(total for the 7years)
The achievements which gained most publicity both at home and abroad
came in the Soviet space programme. Khrushchev was keenly interested in space
research and made sure that no expense was spared to enable the USSR to take
the lead in this area. In 1957 the USSR successfully launched the world's first
artificial satellite [Sputnik). Most spectacular of all, in 1961Yuri Gagarin became
the first cosmonaut to orbit the Earth; at the reception held in Gagarin’s honour
in the Kremlin, Khrushchev said: ‘this achievement is an accomplishment not
only for our people, but for the whole of humanity.' Soviet prestige and Khrush
chev’s reputation were much enhanced. Unfortunately, the costs involved in
these advanced technological projects, together with the military expenditure,
especially on missiles, were so enormous that other areas of the economy suf
fered. Other weaknesses also became apparent in the system; one of the most
I V
disappointing was that the sovnarkhoz reform was not a success. The problem,
as Alec Nove explained, was that ‘any one of the 105 sovnarkhozy was unable to
assess the needs of the other 104, unless they were conveyed to them by the
centre. For how could an official in, say, Kharkov, or Omsk know the relative
importance of requests received from all over the country?... The sovnarkhozy
had only one independent criterion: the needs of their own regions. In the
absence of clear orders to the contrary they therefore allocated scarce resources
to their own regions.’11 Apparently, Khrushchev had expected that the regional
party secretaries would make sure that their sovnarkhozy kept an eye on national
priorities and tried to reconcile them with their own local priorities; but this did
not happen, and the disease known as ‘localism’ was diagnosed. Local officials
were blamed, threatened and sacked, but it seemed to make little difference,
since the defect was built into the system. So for a variety of reasons economic
growth began to slow down, and 1963 saw the lowest peacetime industrial
growth rate since 1933.
(c) Social policies

In some of his later writings, Karl Marx argued that the ultimate aim of
a communist society was to make sure that everybody received what they needed
to enable them to enjoy a standard of living which was, at the very least, above
the poverty line, provided that they contributed to society by means of their
labour. This stage of socialist development would only be reached, however,
when society had achieved a high level of production and there was an abun
dance of most commodities. As we have already seen, at the time of Stalin’s
death, there had been no improvement in the standard of living, real wages were
only about the same as they had been in 1928, and anyway, there was very little
for people to spend their money on - food supplies were lower than they had
been before the war, and there was a shortage of consumer goods. Also in short
supply was adequate housing; this had been a serious problem in the 1930s, but
the damage and destruction of the war years had made things worse. This would
not do for Khrushchev; he did not seriously question the basic tenets of Marxism-
Leninism, and genuinely believed that communism was unquestionably the best
way to organize a state. He was convinced that communism was attainable, but
his travels abroad showed him just how far the USSR was lagging behind the
advanced countries of the West.
Khrushchev made a determined effort to identify exactly why progress towards
the ultimate goal had ground to a halt, and then tried to come up with policies
which would put things right. He was, for example, responsible for giving increased
priority to consumer welfare; between 1955 and 1965, earnings increased at an
average rate of almost three per cent a year, while prices on the whole remained
fairly constant. New wage and salary scales were introduced which reduced the
wide differentials that had existed, and there was a clear decline in poverty.
Taking a poverty-line figure of 30 roubles a month per head, it can be estimated
that in 1958 there were around 68 million state employees and their dependants
living in families with a per capita income of less than 30 roubles, plus at least
33 million collective farm workers also receiving less than 30 roubles a month, so

that at least one hundred million people were living below the poverty line in
1958. Hqwever, in 1967 this total had fallen to about 30 million people receiving
less than 30 roubles a month; this was mainly due to the introduction of the
minimum wage, which actually doubled in the 12 years following Stalin's
death.12Great efforts were made to increase available living accommodation; the
familiar five-storey blocks of pre-fabricated flats began to appear in the cities;
they were much criticized for being dreary and badly built, but at least they were
better than nothing at all.
Although Khrushchev himself only had the basic primary education, he was
interested in education and wanted to introduce changes. There was a shortage
of skilled labour; and he had a theory that the intelligentsia did not sufficiently
value ordinary manual work. Secondary education was already free for all, and in
the new educational programme started in 1958, all students were to receive
eight years of compulsory schooling (from 7 to 15); after that, the student would
take a job or go on to higher education. Those who chose higher education had
first to do three more years’ schooling during which ordinary lessons were com
bined with work on a farm or in a factory. In this way, it was hoped, people who
were destined for professional or other ‘educated’ occupations would learn to
appreciate and respect ordinary workers; the ‘divorce from life and work’ from
which the intelligentsia suffered would be ended, and consequently they would
be better citizens. Khrushchev was also responsible for the expansion of part-
time and correspondence courses. A start was even made on trying to catch up
with the West in the manufacture and use of computers. Some historians believe
that Khrushchev has not been given enough credit for the progress that was
made during this period. His immediate successors tried to write him out of
Soviet history and claim the credit for themselves. But in the words of Alistair
McCauley, ‘he certainly consented to the changes and actively encouraged many
of them ... it reflects his personal vision, and it is not wholly inappropriate to call
it ‘the Khrushchev revolution.'13
\
(d) 'Socialist legality* and culture

‘Socialist legality’ was Khrushchev’s own phrase to denote the relaxation of the
pressures and fears that Stalin had placed on pretty well everybody in society.
The fear of arbitrary arrest and the death penalty was removed, the labour camps
emptied and people were rehabilitated. For some it was too late; Nadezhda
Mandelstam received a letter addressed to her husband Osip, informing him that
he had been rehabilitated; tragically, he had died in a labour camp in 1938. But at
least their families were no longer social outcasts and they could receive a
pension. At the same time those who had hopes of a total thaw - a complete
liberalization - were soon disillusioned; the legal system was still geared to the
whims of the Communist Party, and anyone who persisted in openly criticizing
the party or the government could not expect to remain free for long. The police
probably showed rather more patience than in the past, but anybody who failed
to heed warnings could still be arrested, tortured and sent to a labour camp.
The first reaction of many writers and artists once the dust had settled after
Stalin’s death was to test the new situation to see how far they could go. In
I V
December 1953 the literary journal Novy Mir (New World) published a daring
article by Vladimir Pomerantsev in which he attacked the need to stick to
imposed rules, which stifled initiative and originality; the real test of a work was
its sincerity and truth. The conservatives hit back, claiming that the true test was
a work’s value to the party; no matter how sincere it was, if it expressed ideo
logically incorrect attitudes, then a work could only be harmful to the party. This
duel between conservatives and liberals went on right through the 1960s. Ilya
Ehrenburg caused the next big stir with the publication of his novel, The Thaw, in
May 1954, which was full of fascinating characters and implied criticisms of the
late Stalinist era - the talented artists who can only make a living by painting
pictures of ‘socialist realism’, the Jewish doctor almost driven to a nervous break
down as the ‘Doctors’ Plot' unfolds, and the Stalinist factory manager who cares
more about output targets than about the health of his workers, and is having his
portrait painted to celebrate his successes. Although there was an outcry from
the conservatives who called a congress of Soviet writers in December 1954, none
of the new works were condemned or banned. The mid-1950s saw the rehabilitation
of many writers who had been banned or were in disgrace. Dostoevsky was re
instated, and so were Babel, Bulgakov, Meyerhold and Anna Akhmatova. Mikhail
Sholokhov delivered a bitter attack on the Writers' Union, blaming it for all the
‘grey rubbish’which had appeared in the previous twenty years. After Sholokhov’s
wounding personal criticism, the secretary-general of the union, Alexander
Fadeyev, committed suicide in May 1956. Clearly the liberals or reformers were
in the ascendant
Vladimir Dudintsev was the first writer to overstep the mark, as far as Khrushchev
was concerned. His novel Not by Bread Alone appeared in serial form in Novy Mir
during August, September and October 1956. It tells the story of Lopatkin,
a talented young engineer and inventor, who comes up against a blank wall of
opposition from the entrenched new ruling class - bureaucrats, party officials
and managers. Their faces are set firmly against all innovation which they see as
a threat to their vested interests, and they are powerful enough to get the hero
sent to a labour camp. This was too near the truth for comfort, coming as it did at
the time of the Hungarian uprising. Khrushchev denounced the novel as anti-
Soviet; writers were summoned to his dacha and treated to a long harangue in
which he warned them that the party would not tolerate literature which under
mined the foundations of Soviet society. Yet he had a great respect for writers; he
was prepared to forgive those who genuinely tried to ‘improve’, and no well-known
writer was arrested, imprisoned or exiled. The greatest furore was over Boris
Pasternak’s new novel Doctor Zhivago, which he first submitted for publication
in 1955. None of the publishers would handle it, and Khrushchev accepted the
judgement of his conservative advisers and decided to ban it, though he had
apparently only read short excerpts. The novel was eventually published in Italy
in 1957 and was widely acclaimed. In October 1958 Pasternak was awarded the
Nobel Prize for literature. By this time illegal copies were circulating in the USSR;
Pasternak's critics in the Writers' Union whipped up a campaign of protest
against the author, the novel and the Nobel Prize, and he was expelled from the
Union. He declined the award, fearing that if he left the USSR to attend the
ceremony, he would not be allowed to return. Later Khrushchev said that he

regretted what had happened and proposed that Pasternak should be allowed to
rejoin the Writers’ Union.
Poetry had a special place in Soviet literature; public poetry readings were
extremely popular during the Khrushchev era, and rising young poets like Yevgeni
Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky regularly drew huge audiences of mainly
young people. Their work was critical of Stalinism, and therefore Khrushchev
approved of them; the simple test of what his reaction was likely to be to any new
work was: if it attacked Stalin and his system, it would be tolerated or even
welcomed; if it attacked the party or present aspects of Soviet life, it would be
denounced or refused publication. Yevtushenko’s poem Zima Junction, published
in 1956 when the poet was 23, vividly describes his childhood in the town of Zima
on the Trans-Siberian Railway, his long absence in Moscow and his return at the
age of 20, when his family questioned him closely about life in Moscow; his uncle
Volodya complains:
Now the doctors have turned out innocent;

well, why should people suffer in that way?
Its an international scandal, of course it is,
and all that bloody Beria, I suppose.
Khrushchev strongly approved, but in 1961 when Yevtushenko brought out his
poem Babi Yar, about the massacre of Jews near Kiev during the war, it was
coolly received. It was clearly an attack on the anti-Semitism still prevalent in
Soviet society, and therefore not welcome. Yevtushenko was in semi-disgrace for
a time, and so was the composer Dmitri Shostakovich who set some versesfrom
Babi Yar to music in his Thirteenth Symphony. On the other hand Alexander
Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published thanks
to the personal efforts of Khrushchev. The novel describes the experiences of an
innocent man sentenced under Stalin to a labour camp, and was based on the
author's own experiences of eiglit years in a camp. Solzhenitsyn’s two long
novels, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, were published in 1963, but after that
there was a clampdown which lasted until after Khrushchev’s downfall. The first
signs of this had appeared in December 1962 when he paid a visit to an exhibition
of contemporary paintings in Moscow. He made disparaging comments about
the abstract exhibits, asking ‘what’s the good of pictures like this?’ and dismiss
ing one that he found particularly objectionable as ‘dog shit'. The end of the thaw
also showed itself with an attack on religion; Khrushchev believed that the Christian
churches, particularly the Russian Orthodox Church, were gaining too much
influence on Soviet life. By 1964 the number of monasteries and convents had
been reduced from 69 to 10 and the number of theological seminaries from eight
to three. Thousands of churches were compulsorily closed and the numbers
dropped from 22,000 in 1958 to 7500 by 1964. It was illegal to hold gatherings in
private houses without permission, and since this was never granted for religious
meetings, it became extremely difficult for Christians to worship. Many Christian
leaders who protested were either packed off to remote areas or arrested.
So although the thaw certainly existed under Khrushchev, it was a patchy affair,
and nothing could be taken for granted. When some historians tried to reopen
t \
360 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rûssian History
discussion on various aspects of the party’s history, they were soon warned off.
In 1961 a new party programme was produced promising that the USSR would
overtake the USA in per capita output by 1971. The state would wither away, but
the party would become stronger. According to the programme, the USSR was no
longer a dictatorship of the proletariat, it was ‘a state of the whole people’. But
‘the people' had to be extremely careful what part they tried to play in their state;
in June 1962 the factory workers of Novocherkassk went on strike and organized
a big demonstration in protest against increases in meat and dairy prices. The
demonstrators carried slogans demanding ‘Meat, Milk and Wage Increases’ and
at the head of the procession was a large portrait of Lenin. But this did not save
them: as the procession approached the offices of the local party, it encountered
a line of tanks; troops fired into the crowd, killing 23 people and injuring dozens
more - 49 people were arrested and the KGB held a public trial in the town. Five
of the ringleaders were executed and the rest were given gaol sentences of
between ten and fifteen years.
8.3 Foreign affairs: co-existence and

the Cold W ar
(a) Khrushchev and peaceful co-existence
Krushchev and his colleagues believed that it was absolutely vital to improve
relations with the USA. This was because, as Harry Hanak explains, ‘it was clear
to Khrushchev that the very survival of the Soviet Union and the camp of socialism
did not depend on petty satraps in Eastern Europe or even on Mao Zedong, but
on the USA. The Americans alone were in a position to inflict unacceptable damage
on the USSR.’14 The new Soviet leaders aimed to deal with this problem in two
ways: first of all to build up Soviet military strength in terms of nuclear weapons
to act as a deterrent to the USA; and secondly by preaching peaceful co-existence
and nurturing personal relationships with leading politicians in the West.
Khrushchev loved to travel abroad and believed that personal meetings and
conversations were the best way of solving problems and avoiding serious con
flict; the fact that his wife accompanied him on many of his trips helped to foster
the impression that he was a humane and approachable statesman, not all that
different from Western democratic politicians; Soviet communism, in fact, had
a human face. Even before his de-Stalinization speech Khrushchev was talking
publicly about peaceful co-existence; ‘whether the capitalists like it or not,' he
said in a speech in Bombay in November 1955, ‘the socialists and the capitalists
have to live side by side on one planet.’ At the Twentieth Party Congress he
emphasized that war was not inevitable and that it was possible for the USSR and
the USA to share the domination of the world as partners. ‘There are only two
ways,’ he warned, ‘either peaceful co-existence or the most destructive war in
history. There is no third way.’ This did not mean that the Soviets had entirely
given up the idea of a communist-dominated world, only that it would be
achieved in a different way - when the capitalist world acknowledged the super
iority of the Soviet economic system. The other main theme in his foreign policy

was the idea of winning over to the socialist camp those newly emerging states
which were just gaining their independence from the old colonial powers like
Britain and France. The USSR aimed to attract them by supplying them with
arms, economic aid and expert advice.
On the American side the rampant anti-communist feelings of the McCarthy
era were beginning to moderate with the discrediting of Senator McCarthy in
1954. President Eisenhower announced that the American people wanted friend
ship with the people of the Soviet Union. An important step had already been
taken in July 1953 with the signing of a peace agreement to end the Korean War.
In 1954 the USSR, the USA and Britain took part in a conference held in Geneva
to bring about peace in Indo-China and organize the withdrawal of French
troops. Then in 1955 the Russians made some important concessions: they
agreed to give up their military bases in Finland, lifted their long-standing veto
on the admission of 16 newjrnember states to the United Nations Organization,
and hinted that there was to be more freedom for the states of eastern Europe.
The rift with Yugoslavia was healed, and most important of all, in May 1955 the
USSR signed a peace treaty with Austria and withdrew its army of occupation
which had been there since 1945. In the summer of 1955 Khrushchev and
Bulganin attended a summit conference in Geneva where they met Eisenhower
and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and established cordial relations.
During his time in power Khrushchev visited numerous countries including
Britain, India, France, Switzerland, Indonesia, Burma, Yugoslavia and China; but
the one which attracted most attention was his first visit to the USA, in September
1959. He took with him an entourage of a hundred people, including his wife,
Nina, and many of their family, and the whole party sailed to New York on board
the cruise ship Baltika. Khrushchev and Eisenhower held a series of meetings at
Camp David, and although no specific agreements were signed, the talks were
constructive and mostly good-humoured, in spite of the tensions earlier in the
year over Berlin (see below). Things went so well that both sides began to talk of
‘the spirit of Camp David’ to denóte the ‘thaw’ in the Cold War.
Yet at the same time the arms race was building up; in 1952 the USA made
a hydrogen bomb which was much more powerful than the atomic bombs which
had caused such devastation in Japan. The Russians followed suit, producing
their first hydrogen bomb in 1953, and soon afterwards they produced a bomber
with a range long enough to reach the USA. The Americans remained well ahead
in numbers of nuclear bombs and bombers; in 1955 they had about 1350 bomb
ers capable of attacking the USSR with nuclear weapons, whereas the Soviets had
perhaps 350 aircraft capable of reaching the USA. The Soviet leaders were no
doubt pleasantly surprised when the West failed to take advantage of their
problems in Hungary in 1956, and even more surprised when the USA failed to
support the British and French action at Suez. This probably reassured Khrush
chev and his colleagues that the West was not as aggressive as they had feared,
and would only use their military strength if their vital interests were threatened.
This was a great encouragement to the USSR; nevertheless the Soviets did not
relax their efforts: in August 1957 they produced a new type of weapon - the
inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM). This was a nuclear warhead carried by
a rocket so powerful that it could reach the USA even when fired from inside the
I v
USSR. Not to be outdone, the Americans soon produced their own version of the
ICBM, as well as some shorter-range nuclear missiles which could reach the
USSR from launching sites in Europe and Turkey. When the Russians launched
Sputnik i, the world's first Earth satellite, the Americans also launched a satellite
of their own within a few months.
The thaw in the Cold War was at best inconsistent; there were still some dif
ficult questions to be settled, and it was the problem of East Germany and Berlin
which caused strained relations again. The Western powers were still refusing to
give official recognition to the German Democratic Republic, and Khrushchev
was dismayed at the large numbers of East Germans who were fleeing to the
West via West Berlin. He had been trying to find a way of blocking the exodus for
some time, and in 1958 it seemed that he might have found the answer - an
attack on the Western presence in West Berlin. In November he announced that
the situation in West Berlin was ‘a sort of malignant tumour. If that tumour is not
removed, the situation is fraught with such danger that there might be some
undesirable consequences. Therefore we have decided to do some surgery.’ He
demanded that the Western powers should join the USSR in signing a German
peace treaty within six months; otherwise the USSR would sign a separate treaty
with the East Germans, giving them full control of their own affairs; the East
Germans would then be free to claim the whole of their capital, Berlin, enabling
them to control access to the city, and excluding Westerners if they chose to do
so. It seems likely that Khrushchev's main motive, apart from getting the West
out of Berlin and stopping the drain of East Germans, was to limit West German
rearmament, which was a worry even to some of West Germany’s allies in NATO,
as well as to Moscow. Khrushchev hoped to manoeuvre the West into attending
a summit conference where a German peace treaty could be signed, setting
limits to German rearmament and ratifying the post-war frontiers, including the
division of Germany.
The Western powers did not reply immediately, and when they did, they made
it clear that they objected strongly to being presented with an ultimatum, and
they reasserted their right of free access to West Berlin. Khrushchev therefore
tried a more gentle approach - in January 1959 he lifted the six-month deadline
and agreed to attend a conference of foreign ministers, which met in Geneva for
seven weeks in May and June. No progress was made with the German problem,
but during Khrushchev's famous visit to the USA in September 1959, he agreed to
drop his threat of unilateral action over Berlin, while Eisenhower agreed to the
four-power summit for which Khrushchev had long been pressing. In January
1960, on the strength of the improving relations with the USA, Khrushchev
announced a reduction of one-third in the size of Soviet armed forces, though he
was quick to stress that this would in no way weaken the USSR militarily; the
reduction in numbers of troops would be more than offset by an increase in
numbers of missiles. Underlying this change of emphasis was the belief that it
would be much cheaper to defend the country with rocket forces; this would
make it possible to reduce the defence budget, spend more on consumer goods,
and therefore raise the standard of living.
The long-awaited summit conference was to take place in Paris in May 1960,
but unfortunately it had scarcely started when it broke up in disarray. On 1 May,

two weeks before the summit was due to begin, the Russians shot down an
American U-2 spy plane near Sverdlovsk, deep inside the USSR, and captured its
pilot, Gary Powers. The Americans had been carrying out these flights regularly
since 1956, in spite of several official protests from the USSR. Khrushchev hoped
to make propaganda value ouf of the incident by embarrassing the Americans.
‘Just imagine what would happen/ he asked the Supreme Soviet on 5 May, ‘if
a Soviet aircraft appeared over New York, Chicago or Detroit... How would the
United States react?...What was this? A May Day greeting?' The wreck of the
plane and its equipment were put on show in Gorky Park, where Khrushchev him
self appeared and made another speech attacking the USA. However, his tactics
were to blame the CIA rather than Eisenhower himself, so that relations between
the two leaders would not be irrevocably damaged. Things began to go wrong for
him when Eisenhower admitted responsibility for ordering the flights, and
refused either to apologize ,pr to end them. On the plane to Paris the Soviet
delegation decided to ask Eisenhower for an official apology for the flights and
a promise to end them. According to William Tompson, ‘Khrushchev probably
had little doubt that his demands would mean the break-up of the summit, but,
faced with the prospect of only modest progress in Paris and under pressure
from China, East Germany and Soviet hardliners, he concluded that he could not
afford to go ahead with the meeting unless Eisenhower gave way on the U-2 issue.
The political price would otherwise be too high for what Khrushchev might hope
to achieve at the summit.’15When the four leaders met, Khrushchev put forward
his demands; Eisenhower made one concession, announcing that the flights had
been suspended, but he refused to apologize, claiming that there was nothing to
apologize for. In spite of efforts by Macmillan, the British Prime Minister* and
de Gaulle, the French President, to restrain him, Khrushchev stormed out of the
meeting; the summit was over and so, apparently, was the thaw (Document C).
Khrushchev travelled to New York again in September 1960 in order to attend
the opening of the UN General Assembly. He spent over three weeks in the USA,
and seemed to be doing his best to annoy his hosts; he spent a lot of rime'attacking
the Americans and the United Nations, while being as nice as possible to Third
World leaders. He caused a sensation in one UN meeting when he interrupted
a speech by Macmillan and started banging his shoe on th e table; Macmillan
upstaged him by calmly calling for a translation. Probably under pressure from
hardliners at home, Khrushchev continued his tough stance when he met the
new American President, John F. Kennedy, in Vienna in June 1961. He repeated
his earlier demand that the Western powers must be prepared to leave Berlin
within six months; the situation was becoming critical as the flow of refugees
from East to West Germany via West Berlin became a flood - on average a thou
sand a day were leaving in the summer of 1961. Many of them were members of
the intelligentsia and skilled people who were vital for the rebuilding of the East
German economy. The climax was reached on 12 August when 4000 crossed into
West Berlin on that one day. No progress had been made at the Vienna summit,
and Kennedy had announced: ‘We cannot and will not allow the Communists to
drive us out of Berlin either gradually or by force.' In desperation the East
German leader, Walter Ulbricht, ordered the building of the 28-mile long Berlin
Wall all the way across the city, blocking the escape route. The West protested
i v
strongly and Kennedy sent 1500 troops to West Berlin to make sure that access
was kept open. Tensions were high for a time, but neither side wanted war and
the situation gradually calmed down. Both could claim some success in the epis
ode: Khrushchev had managed to stem the flow of refugees, and arguably saved
East Germany from economic collapse; and in fact Kennedy understood that the
building of the wall was a defensive measure. Kennedy had shown firmness in
the face of Khrushchev’s attempts to browbeat him, and had secured the future
of West Berlin, which was not challenged again for the rest of the Cold War. So in
a strange sort of way the building of the wall seemed to stabilize the situation and
Berlin ceased to be an issue.
(b) The Cuban missiles crisis

No sooner had tensions eased in one area than they began to build up in another.
Cuba, a Caribbean island less than a hundred miles from the coast of Florida,
became involved in the Cold War in 1959 when Fidel Castro seized power from
the corrupt dictator, Batista, who had been backed by the Americans. Castro out
raged the USA by nationalizing American-owned estates and factories, and the
Americans responded by refusing to buy Cuban sugar and breaking off relations.
This only drove Castro into the arms of the USSR: Khrushchev seized the chance
to foster friendly relations with Cuba, agreeing to buy Cuba's sugar exports and
providing other economic aid and military advisers. Kennedy believed that Cuba
was now a communist state in all but name; he approved a CIA plan for a group
of Batista supporters to invade Cuba from bases in Guatemala. There was a gen
eral view in the USA at the time that it was permissible for them to overthrow
hostile regimes which they felt were too near for comfort; they had already got rid
of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala, and they now planned to deal with Castro in
the same way. The small invading force of 1400 men landed at the Bay of Pigs in
April 1961, but the operation was so badly planned that it was easily defeated by
Castro’s army and his two jet planes. Kennedy continued his campaign to bring
down Castro by economic and political means, trying to isolate Cuba, sinking
Cuban merchant ships and sabotaging petroleum sites on the island, while some
40,000 American troops carried out invasion exercises around the neighbouring
island of Puerto Rico. Seriously worried, Castro appealed to the USSR for military
help, and Khrushchev sent over 40,000 troops.
It was Khrushchev's decision to install ballistic missiles on the island that
caused the crisis. The Russians troops were already equipped with short-range
nuclear weapons, and now Khrushchev ordered the building of launching sites
for missiles with a range of up to 2000 miles, which meant that all the major cities
of central and eastern USA would be under threat. There was absolute con
sternation in the USA when, on 14 October 1962, photographs taken from a U-2
spy plane clearly showed missile bases and launch pads under construction.
Khrushchev could justifiably argue that it was the Americans who had caused the
crisis by their aggressive attitude towards Cuba; he was simply responding to
the Cuban request for protection. Clearly, he hoped that the missiles would make
the Americans think twice before attempting another invasion. An additional
motive was to even up the balance of power - to put the Americans under the

same threat as the USSR faced from American missiles in Turkey. As he wrote in
his memoirs: ‘The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases
and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it
feels like to have nuclear missiles pointing at you.’ And of course the Americans
didn't like it; Kennedy was determined that the missiles must go, for the sake of
his own prestige and that of the USA.
According to Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Minister, the Cubans had
already made it clear that if the USA would give effective guarantees that it would
not carry out an armed invasion of Cuba, and not help other countries to invade
either, Cuba would have no cause to reinforce her defences. However, in a meet
ing on 18 October Kennedy told Gromyko: ‘the point is, the present regime in
Cuba does not suit the USA. It would be better if there was a different one there.'
In reply, Gromyko questioned his justification for supposing that the Cubans
should decide their domesda.affairs according to the wishes of Washington, and
he warned Kennedy that if the USA took hostile action against Cuba, ‘the Soviet
Union cannot play the part of bystander.' But he stressed that the USSR did not
want war and hoped to settle the matter through peaceful discussion.16Kennedy
was under pressure from many of his advisers to launch air strikes against the
missile bases in Cuba, but, perhaps influenced by his talks with Gromyko, he
decided to take more cautious action. On 22 October he announced that the USA
had introduced a naval blockade - he called it a ‘quarantine’ operation - to turn
back 25 Soviet ships which were en route to Cuba carrying nuclear warheads.
Without warheads, the missiles were useless; Kennedy also demanded that the
missile sites in Cuba should be dismantled and the existing missiles removed.
The situation was extremely tense: Khrushchev placed Soviet troops in-Cuba
on full alert, and American troops moved into Florida; as the Soviet ships
approached the American quarantine line, the world seemed to be on the brink
of nuclear war. Neither side wanted to take the risk, and Khrushchev made the
first move - he ordered the Soviet ships to turn back. There was enormous relief
in the USA, but the crisis was not over yet; nothing had been decided about the
missiles. On 26 October Khrushchev offered to remove them if the USA would
promise not to invade Cuba. Kennedy did not reply immediately, knowing that
such a promise would be unpopular with many people in the USA. Khrushchev
raised his stakes, demanding a further concession - the removal of American
Jupiter missiles from Turkey. When an American U-2 spy plane was brought
down by a missile over Cuba, some people thought it was the first shot of the war.
However, at this point both leaders kept their nerve and decided to compromise.
Kennedy’s brother Robert, who was the US Attorney-General, met the Soviet
ambassador, Anatoly Dobrinin, informing him that the Americans accepted
Khrushchev's proposals, on condition that the American promise to remove its
missiles from Turkey was kept secret from the American public. The crisis was
over: the Russians began to dismantle the missile sites almost immediately, and
the Americans ended the blockade; in April 1963 they removed their Jupiter
missiles from Turkey, although the public was not told for another six years.
It had been a close run thing, though. Some historians claimed that in reality
the crisis was not as real as it seemed, since neither side intended to start a war.
However, it later emerged that the Soviet forces had 36 nuclear warheads and
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366 Mastering Twentieth-Century RJssian History
24 intermediate range missiles in Cuba, all of which were capable of hitting the
US. The Soviet commanders in Cuba had been authorized to use the nuclear
weapons without further authorization from Moscow, if the Americans invaded
Cuba. American intelligence had got its information wrong - the President was
informed that there were no actual warheads on the island, and that there were
only 10,000 troops, whereas, in reality there were 42,000. If the USA had decided
to risk an attack on Cuba, in view of the supposed weakness of the Soviet and
Cuban defence forces, the Soviets would almost certainly have used their nuclear
weapons.17 Dmitri Volkogonov believed that Khrushchev was fully prepared to
carry out nuclear strikes against the US. ‘Twenty or twenty-five per cent of Soviet
missiles could have found their targets, and in the first - and no doubt last -
assault, ten or twelve nuclear devices would fall on American cities/18Although
Khrushchev had secured the removal of missiles from Turkey, the fact that it was
not announced publicly deprived him of the credit, and his Cuban policy was
seen as a failure. However, he had made sure that Cuba would not be invaded
again by US forces (Document D). The crisis had one important beneficial
outcome: both Khrushchev and Kennedy were shaken by the realization of how
close they had come to a nuclear war, and of how easily it could have started. It
seemed to bring both of them to their senses and led to an improvement in rela
tions. A direct telephone link (known as the ‘hot-line’) was established between
Moscow and Washington. This would allow swift consultations to take place and
avoid the potentially dangerous delays that could occur if the two governments
relied on communication by letter. Talks took place to explore the possibilities of
limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. The first success was achieved in
Moscow on 5 August 1963 when the USSR, the USA and Britain signed the
Limited Test Ban Treaty, agreeing to ban the testing of nuclear weapons in the
Earth’s atmosphere, in space and under water. In January 1964 Khrushchev
reached agreement with the new US President, Lyndon Johnson, to reduce the
production of enriched uranium for making nuclear warheads.
(c) The USSR and the rift with China

When Mao Zedong finally won the civil war in China in 1949, it seemed that there
could be a great future for world communism, with two giant states in alliance. In
1950 they signed a treaty of mutual assistance and friendship. After Stalin’s death
the new Soviet leaders were anxious to develop the relationship further; Khrush
chev's first visit abroad was to China, in September 1954. When the Chinese
requested that Soviet troops should give up their bases in the Chinese ports of
Dairen and Port Arthur, which they had held since 1945, Khrushchev agreed.
Chinese students were invited to come to the USSR to be educated and Soviet aid
to China was increased. But relations soon began to turn sour; Mao was horrified
by Khrushchev’s attacks on Stalin, claiming that Stalin’s mistakes should take
second place to his great achievements. The Chinese recognized that the USSR
was the leader of the communist world, but increasingly, they did not like the
direction in which Khrushchev was trying to lead them. They disapproved of his
policy of peaceful co-existence with the capitalist world, and believed that the
USSR should be stirring up trouble for the capitalists and encouraging revolutions

around the world. Khrushchev had promised to help the Chinese with their nuclear
weapons programme, but then in June 1959 he changed his mind; if the USSR
began supplying its allies with nuclear weapons, this would encourage the USA
to do the same, which was exactly what Khrushchev was trying to prevent. Natur
ally Mao was furious at this and Strongly disapproved of Khrushchev's visit to the
USA in September 1959, when he agreed not to take unilateral action over Berlin.
Mao felt that Khrushchev was kow-towing too much to the capitalists; Western
imperialism, in the words of Mao, was no more than a 'paper tiger', which was
really extremely weak underneath its surface glamour.
By the time Khrushchev went to Beijing for the tenth anniversary celebrations
of the People’s Republic in September 1959, immediately after his trip to the
USA, the atmosphere was extremely chilly. Mao claimed that he was too busy to
spend much time with Khrushchev, and when they did get together, their funda
mental differences were all too obvious. Khrushchev's priorities were peaceful
relations with the west, so that he could reduce the USSR's crippling defence
budget, and friendship with Yugoslavia, which would help stabilize the other east
Européan states. In Mao’s book, Yugoslavia was even more lax than the USSR.
When the Paris summit broke down in May 1960, Beijing was delighted; Mao
obviously thought it served Khrushchev right for talking to the enemy. The quar
rel between the two communist states was out in the open and there were bitter
exchanges at a communist party conference in Bucharest later in May; Khrush
chev denounced the hard-line Chinese leadership as ‘left adventurists’who were
recklessly willing to unleash a third world war. All the Soviet advisers were
recalled from China and all aid was stopped. In November 1960 a conference
attended by representatives of 81 communist parties met in Moscow to try and
heal the rift, but it was a failure. There could be no agreement between the USSR
and China on the question of peaceful co-existence. The Chinese labelled the
USSR as ‘revisionists’ who were departing from strict Marxism-Leninism; this
was a serious accusation in the eyes of communists, and Khrushchev responded
vigorously, accusing Mao of ‘dogmatism’. The vast majority of thosè present
supported Moscow; among the states of eastern Europe, only Albania, which was
ruled by the unreformed Stalinist, Enver Hoxha, supported Beijing. Relations
continued to deteriorate over the next few years; the more the USSR tried to
secure détente and restrict the spread of nuclear weapons, the more determined
the Chinese became to develop their own independent nuclear power.
There were territorial disputes between the two states as well; during the nine
teenth century the Russians had taken over large areas of Chinese territory which
the Chinese now claimed back. The Soviet government refused their demands;
by 1960 both sides had troops positioned along their joint frontier in Asia, and
there were frequent incidents. China was also involved in a frontier dispute with
India; when war broke out between the two in 1962, Mao Zedong expected that
the USSR would support China; however, Khrushchev announced that the USSR
would remain neutral in the dispute, while at the same time dropping hints that
their sympathies lay with the Indians. Mao was full of contempt when, at the end
of October 1962, Khrushchev agreed to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba.
Relations probably reached rock bottom in August 1963 when China refused to
join the USSR and the USA in signing the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The
i '
two leaders continued to hurl insults at each other: Mao produced his famous
criticism that ‘Soviet revisionist collaborators are uniting with the running dogs
of capitalism,’while Khrushchev began to talk of the Chinese as the ‘yellow peril,'
and about Mao as ‘a living corpse.’ From the West’s point of view this was all very
gratifying, since it meant that they no longer had any need to worry about the
threat from an alliance of these two giant communist states.
8.4 Downfall and assessment of Khrushchev

(a) The fall
On 17 April 1964 Khrushchev celebrated his seventieth birthday and was
awarded the title ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ for his services to the state and the
party. But behind the scenes, moves had already started to oust him. Leonid
Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgomy were the prime movers, and they were deter
mined to avoid the mistakes of 1957 when Khrushchev had rallied his support in
the Central Committee to defeat the Presidium. Those in the plot were each
given a group of Central Committee members to convert, and senior party
officials in each region were recruited to convert their subordinates. Not all of
them were amenable, and the plot would have come to nothing if Khrushchev
had not given them plenty of cause for dissatisfaction. Khrushchev’s policies had
upset so many different people that by 1964 there were relatively few who would
be sorry to see him go. His attempts to make the party and the government more
efficient and decentralized were entirely laudable, but they brought him into
conflict with the bureaucracy whose privileged positions were being threatened.
In September 1962 he had pressurized the Presidium into accepting his plan to
divide the party into two sections - agricultural and industrial - a move which
aroused intense opposition. It meant that the authority of provincial officials
would be cut in half, and those who were Central Committee members were
afraid that they would lose their seats to their new colleagues at the next party
congress. In many areas there was a deliberate go-slow on implementing the
policy; some sources estimate that over a third of the provincial committees had
still not carried out the division when Khrushchev left power. The policy was one
of Khrushchev's greatest domestic failures: it angered provincial officials, caused
bitter rivalries between the old and new secretaries, and had disastrous effects on
both agriculture and industry.19
These latest reforms, together with his policy failures in other areas, were the
decisive factors which sparked off the plot. The 1963 harvest was a disappointing
failure, casting doubt on Khrushchev’s entire agricultural policy, and particularly
on the virgin lands scheme. The army and the hardliners disapproved of his cuts in
defence spending and his proposal to reduce Soviet military manpower by one-
third; they deplored the damage to Soviet prestige inflicted by his climbdown over
Cuba, and the poor relations with China. Many of the elite wanted a rapid build-up
of nuclear weapons, not Khrushchev's attempts at limiting nuclear proliferation.
Above all, there was the fact that Khrushchev seemed to have developed the ‘cult of
personality' just as much as Stalin had He never had the same authority as Stalin,

and was always answerable to the Presidium and the Central Committee, but he
became increasingly aggressive and arrogant, bullying his colleagues and deliver
ing stinging attacks on party officials. During his early years in power Khrushchev
always took care to cultivate the Central Committee and enhance its standing, but
he became impatient with it and began to see it as a barrier to progress. After 1960
he tried to reduce the standing of the Central Committee by inviting supporters to
take part who were not entitled to attend. As Martin McCauley puts it: ‘he needed
radicals who would tear the existing structure apart and build a new, dynamic
vehicle of change. Career men and women would minimize risk-taking and seek
compromise solutions... he wanted a revolutionary attitude to work, whereas offi
cials wanted an administrative attitude to prevail. They wanted life and work to be
predictable. Not surprisingly “Khrushchev's” Central Committee voted to remove
him since he posed a powerful threat to their well-being.'20
In October 1964 Khrushchev went on holiday to Pitsunda on the Black Sea. He
had received warnings that a plot was afoot but had not realized that Brezhnev
and Podgorny were leading it. He made the mistake of telling Podgomy that he
would clear it up after his holiday, when he would ‘toss out those responsible like
whelps.' The conspirators, knowing that they had to act quickly, took the
decision to call him back from his holiday to attend a Presidium meeting. A long
list of criticisms of his actions was put to him, and it was suggested that he should
retire. He rejected some of the criticisms, but he apologized for his mistakes and
his rudeness, and he agreed to resign, much to the surprise of most of his
colleagues, who had expected him to put up a fight. The decision was confirmed
by vote at a meeting of the Central Committee plenum, and it was announced
that Khrushchev had retired because of his age and ill-health (14 October); he
was the first Soviet leader to step down. It was also agreed that the posts of First
Secretary of the Committee and Chairman of the Council of Ministers should
never again be held by one person; Brezhnev was chosen as First Secretary and
Kosygin as Chairman. Khrushchev was allowed to live quietly in retirement,
where he spent much of his time recording his memoirs on tape. In spite of the
efforts of the Soviet authorities to prevent it, these were first published in the
USA in 1971, soon after Khrushchev's death.
(b) The importance of Khrushchev and his policies

For over 20 years Khrushchev seemed to have been forgotten; he was scarcely men
tioned in the press - even his death and funeral in September 1971 merited only the
briefest of announcements. With the arrival in power of Mikhail Gorbachev and the
coming of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), interest in Khrush
chev revived; scholars were allowed to study his policies and people were keen to
read what was written about him. So how important was Khrushchev? What sort of
a leader was he? Did he achieve anything significant? In the immediate aftermath
of his downfall the new leadership did all it could to discredit him; on 17 October
Pravda carried a long article which, in the guise of explaining how the ideal
communist leaderhip should work, delivered a devastating attack on Khrushchev
without actually mentioning his name. In effect, it accused him of dreaming up
hare-brained schemes, reaching half-baked conclusions, and taking hasty decisions

and actions without regard to realities. ‘Bragging and phrasemongering, bossiness,
reluctance to take account of scientific achievement and practical experience’were
also mentioned as characteristics which were alien to good leadership. The article
gives the impression that Khrushchev’s career had ended in complete failure. And
of course many of his policies did seem to be ineffective or worse, even disastrous;
the most obvious ones were his agricultural schemes, his decentralizing and
streamlining policies, the division of the party into agricultural and industrial
sections, the Cuban missiles fiasco, and the rift with China, which often seemed
like a personal feud between Khrushchev and Mao Zedong. Some historians have
criticized his lack of success in the area of science and technology, in spite of his
determination to catch up with the West. Huge sums of money were spent and
although this strengthened research and development, Soviet experts did not
succeed in adequately bridging the gap between theoretical research and the
application of the findings towards improved techniques in industry. On the con
trary, some scientists claimed in 1965 that the gulf between the USSR and the USA
in science had actually increased.21 His other serious failure, in the eyes of some
historians, was that he never developed a successful system to get the best out of
industrial workers - either by providing workers with genuine political or economic
incentives or managers with effective sanctions.22
On the other hand there are many historians who feel that Khrushchev deserves
considerable credit. Alec Nove pointed out that because of his policies, supplies
of food and consumer durables increased impressively, and life became more
tolerable for ordinary citizens. 'An economic or political historian writing in the
next century is, in my view,' he wrote in 1987, ‘bound to evaluate Khrushchev's
record positively, but would distinguish the period of his rise, 1953-58, as the
most fruitful. After Stalin’s grim remoteness, his much more approachable,
human, folksy style was a welcome contrast.'23 He had a good record on social
welfare, there were higher growth rates and better harvests, and in his first years,
much greater freedom of discussion, including discussion of economic short
comings, and the publication of previously secret statistics was allowed. G.A.E.
Smith thinks that Khrushchev’s greatest contribution was that he persuaded
his colleagues that coercive central control was not the way to secure the best
results from agriculture; the way forward was more investment, a higher level of
technical competence among farm-workers and managers, and more effective
control over local decision-making. Unfortunately, he was badly let down by the
powerful vested interests in the party and state administration, which opposed
greater investment in agriculture in order to provide necessities like chemical
fertilizers and weed-killers. The agricultural work force also let him down: ‘the
way in which apathetic farm workers misused and abused machinery and equip
ment resulted in enormous waste and low yields, a problem which could not be
solved simply by pouring in even more resources.'24Khrushchev had the courage
to break with the past in other ways too; if he had done nothing else, his bold
denunciation of Stalin and his attempts to steer the system away from the
cruelties and the rigidity of the previous 25 years should earn him a high place in
Russian history. He wanted to reduce the tight grip of the bureaucracy and to
‘return power to the people,’ as he put it. Although his immediate successors,
including Brezhnev, belittled most of his ideas, when they came to draw up the

so-called ‘Brezhnev* constitution in 1977, they incorporated in it Krushchev's
concept of the all-people’s state (see section 9.1 (c)).
Khrushchev genuinely believed that Marxism-Leninism could work and that
Stalin had hi-jacked the movement. Therefore it was vital to get back to the basic
principles of Lenin. Khrushchev also recognized that to survive, communism
must begin to ‘deliver the goods;’ the Soviet people must be able to start enjoying
the time of plenty that the communists had been promising for so long. His
attractive personality, his enthusiasm and his self-confidence drew great support
among the younger generation; those who responded to his campaign to change
things were known as ‘Children of the Twentieth Congress'. In many ways, as we
have seen, life did improve for most people; Robert Service sums it up succinctly;
‘High-rise apartment blocks were put up in all cities. Diet went on improving. Meat
consumption rose by fifty-five per cent between 1958 and 1965 alone. Fridges,
televisions and even washing-machines entered popular ownership. The hos
pital and education services were free and universally available; rents, home heat
ing and cooking fuel were very inexpensive. Labour discipline was relaxed.
Unemployment was practically unknown. Wages rose after 1953 and kept on rising
... The retention of cheap urban cafeterias meant that neither pensioners nor the
working poor starved.’25
Martin McCauley sees Khrushchev as an original leader who, ‘despite his modest
success, was good for the Soviet Union and the world.’ One of his achievements
was to bring the Soviet Union on to the world stage, to reduce some of the fear it
had aroused, and to increase respect for it. ‘His policy of peaceful co-existence,
the first Sputnik and the first man in space added immensely to the Soviet
Union’s prestige;' this gave the illusion that the USSR was ahead of the USA in
science and technology. The reasons why Khrushchev’s success was only modest
was because he was trying fundamentally to change Soviet society; this involved
‘systematically dismantling the system on which the privileges and power of the
bureaucracy rested. He was forced to adopt reform after reform because his
original solution had been blocked. His zigzagging is testimony to the strength of
the bureaucratic opposition, but also to his refusal to concede defeat... Given
time he could have fundamentally changed the Soviet system.’ McCauley sees
Khrushchev as a kind of heroic failure, a man with a noble vision which was
eventually brought to naught, ‘not because of its shortcomings, but because of
the greed and concern for position of those in authority.’26Perhaps it is appropriate
to allow a Russian historian the final word; Dmitri Volkogonov, who was not
over-enthusiastic about any of the Soviet leaders, nevertheless conceded that
Khrushchev had performed a great historical service: ‘he had done the virtually
impossible: as a fledgling from Stalin’s nest, he had undergone a visible change
in himself and in a fundamental way also changed society. However much his
successor, Brezhnev, may have sympathized with aspects of Stalinism, he could
not bring himself to restore it: the obstacles placed in the way by Khrushchev
proved insurmountable.’ The fact that when he was ousted, he was not exiled,
shot or flung into jail, was a tribute to his own condemnation of such methods in
1956. Volkogonov approved of Khrushchev’s memoirs too: ‘Khrushchev Remembers
reveals Khrushchev’s character as a bold and impulsive politician, and as both an
orthodox Marxist and a heretic, and it is among the best works on the period.’27
I V
Documents
(A) Extracts from Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization speech delivered at the Twentieth
Party Congress, 25 February 1956. (For further extracts from the speech, see
Chapter 7, Document H).
Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient co-operation

with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute sub
mission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his
viewpoint and the correctness of his position, was doomed to removal from
the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation...
Comrades, we must abolish the cult of the individual decisively and restore
completely the Leninist principles of Soviet socialist democracy, expressed in
the constitution of the Soviet Union, to fight the wilfulness of individuals
abusing their power. Comrades, the Twentieth Congress of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union has manifested with a new strength the unshakeable
unity of our Party, its cohesiveness around the Central Committee, its resolute
will to accomplish the great task of building Communism. [Tumultuous
applause.]
We are absolutely certain that our Party, armed with the historical resolutions
of the Twentieth Congress, will lead the Soviet people along the Leninist path
to new successes, to new victories. Long live the victorious banner of our Party -
Leninism! [Tumultuous prolonged applause ending in ovation. All rise.]
Source: quoted in John Laver, The USSR 1945-1990, pp. 20-1.
(B) Khrushchev, at the Twenty-Second Party Congress, 31 October 1961, promises

a successful future for the people of the USSR.
In the current decade (1961-70) the Soviet Union will surpass the strongest
and richest capitalist country, the USA, in production per head of population;
the people’s standard of living and their cultural and technical standards will
improve substantially; everyone will live in easy circumstances; all collectives
and state farms will become highly productive and profitable enterprises; the
demand of Soviet people for well-appointed housing will, in the main, be
satisfied; hard physical work will disappear; the USSR will have the shortest
working day.
The material and technical basis of Communism will be built up by the end of
the second decade (1971-80), ensuring an abundance of material and cultural
values for the whole population. Soviet society will come close to a stage where
it can introduce the principle of distribution according to needs, and there
will be a gradual transition to one form of ownership - national ownership.
Thus a Communist society will be built in the USSR... Active participation of
(icontinued)

all citizens in the administration of the state, in the management of economic
and cultural development, improvement of the government apparatus, and
increased control over its activity by the people - this is the main direction in
which socialist statehood develops in the building of Communism...
Source: quoted in Laver, pp. 14-15.
(C) Khrushchev’s impromptu speech at a press conference immediately after the

breakup of the Paris summit, 16 May 1960, over the U-2 spy-plane affair - a
typical example of his off-the-cuff style - aggressive, pugnacious and amusing.
Gentlemen, please forgive me, but I want to give a reply right away to the
group who are doing all the booing here. I have been informed that Chancellor
Adenauer [the leader of West Germany] has sent agents who were not beaten
by us at Stalingrad, into the Soviet Union to boo at us. But we booed at them
and chased them three metres into the ground. So, take a look around you
when you boo us. We beat you at Stalingrad, in Ukraine and Belorussia, and
we finished you off.
I am the representative of the great Soviet people; the people who made the
great October socialist revolution under Lenin’s leadership, a people who are
successfully building a Communist society. If you boo at me you are only
making me bolder in my class struggle... Gentlemen, I will not hide my satis
faction from you, I enjoy fighting the enemies of the working class. I like to
hear the imperialist lackeys raging and unable to do anything.
Source: quoted in Dmitri Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, p. 223.
(D) Khrushchev, in his memoirs (published in 1971), gives his version of the
Cuban missiles crisis.
We sent the Americans a note saying that we agreed to remove our missiles
and bombers on condition that the President give us his assurance that there
would be no invasion of Cuba by the forces of the United States or anybody
else. Finally Kennedy gave in and agreed to make a statement giving us such
an assurance... It has been, to say the least, an interesting and challenging
situation. The two most powerful nations in the world had been squared off
against each other, each with its finger on the button. It was a great victory for
us though, a triumph of Soviet foreign policy... a spectacular success without
having to fire a single shot!... We behaved with dignity and forced the United
States to demobilize and to recognize Cuba. Cuba still exists today as a result
of the correct policy conducted by the Soviet Union when it rebuffed the
United States. I’m proud of what we did.
Source: Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, p. 500.

i v
(E) Sir Frank Roberts tells what he remembers about Khrushchev. Roberts
attended the Yalta Conference, was British Minister in Moscow, 1945-47,
and British Ambassador to Moscow, 1960-62. He worked closely with Stalin,
Molotov and Khrushchev.
My first direct contact with Khrushchev came when I was Ambassador in

Yugoslavia at the time he made his expedition in 1955 to persuade Tito to forgive
and forget the breach made by Stalin in 1948. His behaviour then was typical
of Khrushchev’s approach to so many of the problems he thought he could
solve. He started with a brainwave, calling for rapid action alien to the normal
thought processes of his more plodding colleagues, and running serious risks
of failure and even humiliation, but which, if successful, could bring big divi
dends and realize important policy objectives. His impulsive handling of the
situation was clumsy and counter-productive, but he then retrieved from the
apparent wreck enough of his original purpose to justify the enterprise... At
the reception he drank too much and had to be carried out through rows of
diplomats and other guests on the arms of Tito and Rankovic, with his feet
sketching out the motions of walking without ever touching the ground. But
the end result... did ensure that Yugoslavia resumed inter-state relations...
I have never seen him more pleased with himself and his country than at his
reception of Gagarin at Moscow Airport and at the subsequent Kremlin recep
tion. It was at this time that he coined the slogan that the Soviet Union should
not only catch up with, but overtake the USA, following on the misunderstood
quip that the Soviet Union would see the US buried (not bury her itself). The
Moscow wits were wiser when they commented that, while catching up was
all right, there should be no overtaking, since this would only enable the
Americans to see the patches on the seats of Russian trousers.
Khrushchev did not acquire the confident support of the Soviet population,
despite all he had done to free them from Stalin's tyranny. They instinctively
felt that his behaviour was not that expected of a Russian leader - as for
example, in the shoe-slapping episode at the UN. However, for me he remains
a man who, despite mixed motives and often confused thinking... did make life
less dangerous and more comfortable for most people in the Soviet Union...
He was a most accessible, communicative, human and stimulating leader,
however adversarial, with whom to do business.
Source: Frank K. Roberts, ‘Encounters with Khrushchev', in Martin McCauley (editor), Khrushchev
and Khrushchevism, pp. 217,219,228.
Notes
1. Dmitri Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall o f the Soviet Empire, p. 196.
2. William J. Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life, p. 121. For discussion of the power
struggle, see pp. 114-42.
3. Martin McCauley, ‘Khrushchev as Leader’, in M. McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and
Khrushchevism, pp. 12-13 for how Khrushchev built up his political ‘tail’.

4. Tompson, p. 161.
5. Martin McCauley, The Soviet Union 1917-1991, p. 233.
6. Jonathan Luxmore and Jolanta Babiuch, The Vatican and the Red Flag, pp. 80-2.
7. Tompson, p. 169.
8. Alec Nove, An Economic History o f the USSR, 1917-1991, p. 336. For a full account of
Khrushchev’s agricultural policies, see pp. 336-48,372-7.
9. GAE. Smith, ‘Agriculture’, in Martin McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism,
p. 105.
10. Nove, p. 363.
11. Ibid., p. 368.
12. Alistair McCauley, ‘Social Policy’, in Martin McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and Khrush
chevism, pp. 146-7.
13. Ibid., p. 144.
14. Harry Hanak, 'Foreign Policy’, in Martin McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and Khrushche
vism, p. 183.
15. Tompson, p. 225. For details of the U-2 crisis, the failure of the summit and Khrushchev’s
thinking, see pp. 219-28. For« detailed study of the U-2 crisis in the context of Soviet-US
relations, see Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair,
London, 1986.
16. Andrei Gromyko, Memories, pp. 176-7.
17. Martin McCauley, The Soviet Union 1917-1991, pp. 244-5.
18. Volkogonov, pp. 235-47 for his account of the crisis.
19. Tompson, pp. 254-6.
20. Martin McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism, pp. 23-4.
21. M.J. Berry, ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, in Martin McCauley (editor), Khrushchev
and Khrushchevism, pp. 90-4.
22. Donald Filtzer, ‘Labour’, in Martin McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism,
p. 137.
23. Alec Nove, ‘Industry’, in Martin McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism,
p. 70.
24. GAE. Smith, ‘Agriculture’, in Martin McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism,
p p .113-14.
25. Robert Service, A History of Twentieth Century Russia, pp. 356-7.
26. Martin McCauley, ‘Introduction’ and 'Khrushchev as Leader’, in Khrushchev and
Khrushchevism, pp. 3,26-9. N
27. Volkogonov, pp. 248, 252. Khrushchev's memoirs are in two versions: Khrushchev
Remembers (London and New York, 1971) and the much more detailed Khrushchev
Remembers. The Glasnost Tapes (New York, 1990).
>v
■ u 9 The Brezhnev years - the USSR
stagnates, 1964-85
Summary of events
Khrushchev*s fall in October 1964 - he was the first Soviet leader not to die in
office - was followed by the usual manoeuvring for power among his colleagues.
Leonid Brezhnev soon became Secretary-General of the Party, with Alexei Kosy
gin as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. At first Brezhnev was in charge of the
party, the administration and agricultural matters, while Kosygin was respon
sible for foreign affairs and industry. Of the two, Kosygin was the more go-ahead
and reform-minded, but by the early 1970s, as the other members of the collective
leadership either died or were dropped, Brezhnev gained the ascendancy. Reform
disappeared from the agenda, and Brezhnev's years in control turned out to be
a period of stagnation. Many of Khrushchev's reforms were abandoned and
pressing economic problems were ignored:
• Although agricultural yields increased, the government failed to solve the

built-in problems of the collective farm system.
• After a promising beginning during the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1966-70), indus
trial performance was disappointing during the Ninth Five-Year Plan, (1971-75),
and the decline continued during the Tenth Five-Year Plan (1976-80).
Brezhnev and his colleagues were less tolerant of criticism than Khrushchev, in
all spheres of activity; anything that threatened the stability of the system or
encouraged independent thinking was stifled, and this applied to the states of
eastern Europe as well. When liberal trends developed in Czechoslovakia in
1968, a massive invasion took place by Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops. The
reforming government was removed and replaced by a strongly pro-Moscow
regime. Soon afterwards Moscow announced the Brezhnev Doctrine - Soviet
intervention in the internal affairs of any communist state was justified if
socialism in that state was considered to be threatened. Brezhnev's record on
human rights was not impressive, and so by 1967 the human rights movement
had developed; leading figures in the movement were the scientist Andrei
Sakharov, the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the historian Roy Medvedev
and his twin brother Zhores, a biologist The movement spread to Czechoslovakia
where, in 1977, a human rights group calling itself ‘Charter IT was formed. There
was trouble in Poland too - industrial unrest, food shortages and strikes forced
The Brezhnev years 377

the government to resign in 1980, and an independent trade union movement,
known as Solidarity, was formed.
One area in which the Brezhnev regime did try to continue Khruchshev’s work
was foreign policy - pulling out all the stops to achieve parity with the USA in
armaments, which they claimed to have reached by the early 1970s, and trying to
bring about a relaxation of international tension - a policy known as détente.
Brezhnev's efforts brought some success - he had three meetings with US President
Nixon, and in 1972 a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) was signed.
However, there were setbacks, not least the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on
Christmas Day 1979. When the Russians removed the Afghan president and
replaced him with a leader more favourable to the USSR, all the old Western sus
picions of Soviet motives revived. All through the Brezhnev years the USSR was
plagued by the same old problem - the enormous cost of the arms race and the
attempt to play a global role ipiposed an ever-increasing strain on her economy.
When Brezhnev died in 1982 at the age of 76, he was succeeded first by Yuri
Andropov, who hoped to introduce some reforms, but died after only 15 months
in office. The Politburo chose Konstantin Chernenko as the next Secretary-
General, but he was over 70 and already terminally ill; he died after only 13 months,
leaving the country in dire need of a younger leader with energy and vision.
Main areas of debate;
• Why did the USSR stagnate under Brezhnev?

• To what extent was life better during the Brezhnev era? ^
• How far can Brezhnev's foreign and eastern bloc policies be seen as
a success?
9.1 Personnel and policies

(a) The rise of Brezhnev
The leading group of Presidium members consisted of Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei
Kosygin, Nikolai Podgorny, Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov. For some months
it seemed that there would be a genuinely collective leadership; Kosygin, the
man in charge of foreign affairs and industry, gave the impression of being the
senior figure in the government, and in 1965 was responsible for some important
economic reforms, the last to be attempted until 1979. The 1968 Czech crisis was
a turning point (see section 9.3(a)); Kosygin was not in favour of Soviet intervention,
and since this left him very much in a minority in the Politburo (the Presidium
changed its name back to the Politburo in March 1965), his influence began to
decline. Meanwhile Brezhnev's position as Secretary General of the party enabled
him gradually to build up his support, appointing his allies to important posts;
for example, in 1967 Yuri Andropov was made head of the KGB, and Brezhnev's
friend Marshal Andrei Grechko became USSR Minister of Defence. Relations
with the Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe came under the heading of party
t V

matters, which is why Brezhnev found himself thrust into the limelight in 1968
when Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. After that it was Brezhnev
who took charge of foreign affairs and began to act increasingly as the head of
state. By the end of the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in March 1971, his sup
porters were in a majority on both the Politburo and the Central Committee, and
he was, in effect, the leader.
Brezhnev was 58 years old when Khrushchev was removed. He was bom in
1906 in Ekaterinoslav province, Ukraine, of working-class Russian parents. His
father was a metalworker; the young Leonid also worked in the industry for
a tíme, until the family moved back to Russia, where he took a course in agricultural
methods. He joined the party in 1929 and later returned to Ukraine, qualifying as
an engineer in 1935. He lived in the important industrial city of Dnepropetrovsk,
where he began to rise through the party ranks, so that by the outbreak of war, he
was a member of the Ukrainian party elite. During the war he was a political
commissar, reaching the rank of Major-General. He attracted the attention of
Khrushchev who, in 1950 recommended him to Stalin for the job of First Secretary
of the Moldavian party. As a protégé of Khrushchev, Brezhnev's career continued
to flourish and in 1956 he was promoted to candidate membership of the Presid
ium. According to Dmitri Volkogonov, ‘he was a man of one dimension, with the
psychology of a middle-ranking party functionary, vain, wary and conventional.
He was afraid of sharp turns, terrified of reform, but was capable of twisting the
party line in whatever direction the hierarchy desired.' He had a reputation of
being good-humoured and sympathetic with his subordinates, and got his way
not by harshness and threats, but by patience and persuasion. But with his long
experience as a member of the party apparatus, he had learned that the most
important requirement was to avoid upsetting those in authority over him. ‘Having
given his complete verbal support to Khrushchev’s reformism, Brezhnev turned
out to be its very antithesis.'1
(b) Economic policies

The new leadership soon dropped many of what they considered to be Khrushchev's
‘hare-brained schemes;' the division of the party into agricultural and industrial
wings was abandoned, and the Ministry of Agriculture was brought back with all
its former powers restored. The controversial regional economic councils
(sovnarkhozy) were abolished and the original industrial ministries were brought
back. The leaders had to face up to the problem which was to exercise them
throughout the Brezhnev years - the question of how to allocate limited
economic resources among all the vital areas of the economy. Brezhnev, with his
special interest in agriculture, was keen to invest more in that area; Kosygin
wanted to place the emphasis on producing more consumer goods; the military
wanted to increase the defence budget to enable the USSR to catch up with the
USA in armaments. Brezhnev hoped to reduce defence expenditure and inter
national tension, making more cash available to finance his plans for agriculture.
He recognized that Khrushchev had been right to aim for increased production
of chemical fertilizers and weed-killers. However, he abandoned the idea of
growing maize in every available area and concentrated on increasing output in

Figure 9.1 Brezhnev speaking at a public meeting during a visit to Bulgaria, September 1973.
central Russia. He relied on the conventional methods: the central fixing of quotas,
central instructions on what to sow and when, and increases in procurement
prices in order to give farmers more incentive. There was a massive increase in
state investment in agriculture, which more than doubled in the decade 1965-75;
by 1980 no less than 27 per cent of all capital investment was going into agriculture.
Statistically the results seemed reasonable: by 1980 gross agricultural output was
21 per cent higher than the average for 1966-70; grain output - always taken as
the main indicator for the success of Soviet agriculture - averaged 205 million
tons a year during 1976-80 as against only 130.3 million tons in 1961-65.2
However, this was insufficient to meet the rapidly growing demand for food
from a population which was now much better paid. The government kept food
prices low - meat prices, for example, had not increased since 1962, and since
average wages had doubled, people could afford to eat more. Some years suf
fered bad harvests; during the Brezhnev era there were five poor years, mainly
because of bad weather; so, for example, although the average grain harvest for
1971-75 was 181.6 million tons, the total for 1972 was only 156 million tons, and
the shortfall had to be made up by imports from the USA. Nor did the situation
improve: the average annual grain harvest for 1981-85 fell from 205 million tons
to 181 million tons, and consequently the USSR had to import some 40 million
tons of grain each year. What was wrong with Soviet agriculture? The list of
weaknesses is a long one. It was too centralized - farmers were given their orders
from Moscow and there was very little room for local discretion and initiative;
380 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rctssian History

many of the collective farms were too big and it was difficult to organize the
labourers, who were largely unskilled. Labourers were paid for the length of time
worked rather than for the amount produced; nor was any account taken of the
quality of what was produced. Although subsidized, many kolkhozy still operated
at a loss, mainly because prices for machinery and fuel continued to rise. There
was a severe shortage of skilled workers - machine operators and mechanics -
which meant that equipment was poorly maintained and continually breaking
down. Storage facilities were poor and so were the roads. On top of all that,
there was the basic problem which had hampered collective farming from the
beginning - lack of motivation - kolkhozniks would put more effort into working
their private plots than into the collective. Brezhnev recognized this and allowed
labourers to have larger plots - up to a maximum of half a hectare each. In the
final years of the Brezhnev regime the private plots were yielding a staggering 30 per
cent of total agricultural output, although they made up only four per cent of the
USSR's cultivated area.3 This clearly suggested that the solution to the problem
was to de-coUectivize agriculture, but of course, ideologically, that was out of the
question.
Soviet industry suffered from similar problems to those of agriculture: it was an
overcentralized, command economy in which compulsory orders were passed
down from the centre, local managers had too little power, the price system did
not correspond to supply and demand, and was dictated from Moscow by often
ill-informed planners; this made it difficult to calculate the actual costs of pro
duction. As industry became more advanced and sophisticated, the centralized
system simply could not cope with the new complexities of the situation. Kosygin
was one of the few leaders to favour less state control of the economy; in September
1965 he was able to persuade the Politburo to introduce important changes:
more powers were to be given to local managers, there would be fewer "commands'
from Moscow, and prices were to be recalculated on the basis of costs of produc
tion; enterprises were encouraged to make a profit, which would enable bonuses
to be paid for outstanding performance and the development of new technology.
The results of the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1966-70) suggested that the Kosygin
reforms were having a beneficial effect; official Soviet statistics claimed that
industrial output increased by 50 per cent and national income by 41 per cent,
both slightly exceeding their targets. However, the Ninth and Tenth Plans were
much less successful; production of almost all commodities failed to achieve
their targets, and this trend was continued during the period 1981-85.
The seriousness of the situation was partly concealed by the rapid escalation
of world oil prices in 1973 and the equally rapid increase in the price of gold in
1979, both of which were produced in large quantities in the USSR. There was a
roughly five-fold increase in the prices of both oil and gold; the extra income
from gold sales alone was enough to pay for all the grain imports in 1979. The
USSR also benefited from an increase in the world prices of raw materials, of
which she was a great exporter. Superficially, this surge of new income gave the
impression that no economic reform was necessary; but the fact remained that
in the early 1980s Soviet industry was on the verge of a crisis. What had gone
wrong? Kosygin's reforms turned out to be a great disappointment; the new free
dom for managers did not include the right to set prices, which were still decided

centrally, and their ‘powers' were insufficient to make any real difference. Their
one important prerogative - the right to fix their own targets - proved to be counter
productive; it was in their interests to keep the planned targets down, so that they
could achieve or even surpass them. As in the days of Stalin, it was still common
for managers to send in false results in order to keep their superiors happy. By
1970 Kosygin’s reforms were being quiedy abandoned and industrial organization
had slipped back into its traditional Stalinist mode. There were other contributory
factors pushing industry towards crisis-point: a great proportion of industrial
plant and machinery was becoming obsolete and needed replacing; but the slow
down in investment meant that the obsolete machinery and equipment continued
in use and was continually having to be repaired. This required heavy expenditure
which should have been used on improved technology. Another problem was the
low birth-rate, which meant that the working population had almost stopped
increasing, and there were serious labour shortages in some sectors. The one
area of the economy which wàs unquestionably successful was the production of
military hardware. By the early 1970s the USSR had caught up with the USA in
numbers of inter-continental missiles, and had developed a new weapon, the
anti-ballistic missile (ABM). Unfortunately, the arms race did not stop there - the
Americans continued to produce even more deadly missiles, and at each step
the USSR strained to draw level again. This was the real problem of the Soviet
economy - defence spending was so vast that the civilian areas of the economy
were deprived of the necessary investment to keep them up-to-date.
(c) The constitution of 1977

Khrushchev had first announced in 1961 that a new constitution was imminent,
to update Stalin’s 1936 constitution. When it eventually appeared, many of its
clauses formalized what was actually happening in Soviet government and soci
ety; the rest were features which ordinary citizens would like to see happening in
a ‘people’s state’, but which so far had not materialized. The rble of the
Communist Party, which had occupied a relatively minor place in Stalin's con
stitution (article 126), was now given a much higher profile, as early as article 6:
‘the leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political
system, its state organizations and public organizations is the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union.' Of course, everybody knew that it was a one-party state, but
this was the most formal statement of reality so far in Soviet history. Article 1
stated that the USSR was a socialist state of ‘the whole people' rather than just
‘workers and peasants,’ and the intelligentsia for the first time were given equal
standing with workers and peasants; thus the Soviets of working people’s
deputies became Soviets of people’s deputies. ‘Democratic centralism’, which
had always been the guiding principle of the party, was now extended to the
whole state. Elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Supreme Soviets
of the republics were to take place every five years instead of every four. The right
of the republics to secede from the USSR was retained and the clause which
talked of merging the different nationalities into one great Soviet nation was
dropped. Other new clauses guaranteed free health services, cheap housing
and the right of the individual to take part in decision-making. There was even

a clause about protecting the environment, although clearly not much notice was
taken of that. With détente in mind, article 29 read: 'Relations between the USSR
and other states are founded on the basis of observing the principles of sovereign
equality; mutual rejection of the use of force and the threat of force; inviolability
of frontiers; the peaceful settlement of disputes; non-interference in internal
affairs; respect for human rights and the basic liberties; equality and the rights of
people to manage their own affairs... ’
Brezhnev was extremely proud of his constitution and claimed that it would
last for many decades. Some of the clauses were obviously no more than window-
dressing; for example, the idea that ordinary people could play a part in making
important decisions was laughable; it was the Politburo which decided things,
and the Politburo was still not even mentioned in the constitution.4 Nevertheless,
Brezhnev apparently took it all seriously; he was determined to maintain the
supremacy of the party and described the stage which Soviet society had reached
as ‘developed socialism.’ In 1977 party membership was around 16 million, and
17.4 million by 1981. This meant that about one in ten adults were party members.
In the words of Robert Service, ‘their assigned duty was to inspire and mobilize
the rest of society. The idea was that the more members, the better the chance to
secure universal acquiescence in the status quo.’ But this was not necessarily the
case; not all party members were in sympathy with the Politburo, which was
frightened to death of any radical change. ‘The contemplation of change would
have required a concentration of intellectual faculties that hardly any of them
any longer possessed.’5 However, there was probably a large minority of officials
within the party apparatus who favoured some kind of reform.
9.2 Everyday life, dissent and opposition

(a) Social changes
Great changes took place during the Brezhnev years; the process of urbanization
continued and the USSR moved from being a mainly agricultural country to
being mainly industrial and urban. As late as 1926 only 18 per cent of the popu
lation lived in towns, but by 1980, out of a total population of 265 million, 63 per
cent lived in towns.6 On the whole life was better in the cities and large towns
than in the countryside; there were more goods and services available, and this
attracted people to move from rural areas. During the early 1970s the influx was
so great that it put a strain on the available resources and accommodation, and
the government placed restrictions on further migration. The housing shortage
remained a serious problem; in the mid-1970s about 40 per cent of Soviet fam
ilies still shared flats, and newly married couples almost always had to live with
in-laws. Not surprisingly, there was a fall in the birth-rate in urban areas of the
Russian Republic and to some extent in the European republics, where an
increasing number of couples were happy to have just one child. The most
disturbing aspect of this was that since all forms of contraceptives were in short
supply, abortion was common practice among women in the European part of
Russia. One calculation showed that in the late 1960s, there was an average of six

legal abordons per woman over the whole of the USSR, which meant that the
average for Russian women was much higher than that. At the same tíme the
Muslim‘ population, especially Tadzhiks, Uzbeks and Kirghiz, was growing
rapidly- by 25 per cent between 1970 and 1979; by 1980 the Great Russians made
up only 52 per cent of the total population of the USSR, and if the state had
survived beyond 1991, they would have been increasingly in a minority.7
Brezhnev genuinely wanted the workers to be better-off and more comfortable,
and there is no doubt that life did improve for most people. In 1967 the five-day
working week was introduced, together with fifteen working days’ holiday. Soviet
citizens were not as well off as those in Western countries, but at least Soviet
society was more egalitarian. In the period 1965 to 1977 real wages increased by
almost 50 per cent, and the differentials between urban and rural workers
narrowed. Many industrial and blue-collar workers were better paid than some
professional groups; for example, in the 1970s a bus driver earned 230 roubles
a month, but a secondary school teacher was only paid 150 roubles. Consumer
goods may well have been in short supply, but they were obtainable in increasing
numbers; in 1965, for instance, only 24 per cent of Soviet households owned
a television set, but in 1974 the percentage had risen to 71 and by 1986 it had
reached 96; similarly between 1965 and 1974 the percentage of those owning
a refrigerator rose from 11 to 56, and households owning a washing-machine went
up from 21 per cent to 62 per cent. Education was arguably the greatest success
story of the Soviet system; illiteracy had almost been eliminated by 1982 and the
state was working towards free secondary education for the whole population.
The system was strong in science and mathematics, though critics complained
that there was too much learning by rote, and that creative and critical thinking
were not encouraged. There were sixty universities and eight hundred higher
technical schools for the brightest students; the number of Soviet citizens with
higher education increased from 8.3 million in 1959 to 18.5 million in 1984.®
Other positive aspects of Soviet life were the near elimination of unemployment,
and the full programme of social security - pensions, free health care, holidays
with pay, child benefits, pregnancy and maternity leave, and free nursery care for
children of working parents. On the other hand, the pensions were barely
enough to provide for a comfortable retirement and the health care provided
seems to have been below the standard of that in the developed capitalist states.
There was a marked improvement in diet during the Brezhnev era, though even
in 1985 it had not quite reached the levels recommended by dieticians. One
trend which gave cause for concern was rising death rates; these had been falling
steadily since the Second World War, so that, for example, by the mid-1960s life
expectancy for men had risen to 66, and infant mortality had fallen to 22.9 per
thousand babies dying before the age of one. However, by the mid-1970s life
expectancy for Soviet men had fallen to 63 (it was 69 in the USA) and the child
mortality rate had risen to 36 per thousand live births (10.6 per thousand in the
USA). Various explanations have been offered for what seems to be a surprising
trend in a time of improving diet; these include rapidly worsening environmental
pollution, alcoholism, which was becoming a major problem, especially among
pregnant women, influenza and pneumonia epidemics in the child day-care
centres, and an increasing number of suicides.
384 Mastering Twentieth-Centur^ fîssian History

One very significant trend was the growth of privacy and the development of
free discussion in small, informal groups. In the words of Archie Brown: ‘Over
drinks and around kitchen tables the most diverse array of political views could
be heard, ones which hardly anyone would have dared utter aloud in Stalin’s
time. The growth of freedom of expression in private circles preceded by two to
three decades the achievement in the Gorbachev era of freedom of expression in
public.' The increasing amount of accommodation was important in this
respect, since it enabled millions of people to move from communal apartments
to single-family flats where they were able ‘to shut their own front door.’9It was a
kind of private glasnostwhich helped the formation of small groups of like-minded
people, ranging from genuinely progressive reformers to backward-looking
nationalists who talked with nostalgia about tsarist days. None of these groups
organized any sort of formal campaign, but they did help to prepare the way for
the much greater element of glasnost under Gorbachev.
(b) Culture, dissent and opposition

Informal groups also discussed literature, art, music and science, and Brezhnev’s
regime was reasonably tolerant at first, provided that any material which they
might circulate did not threaten to turn people against the government’s policies.
In the early years after Khrushchev's downfall there was a struggle between the
conservatives who wanted to ban writings with the slightest whiff of the avant-garde
about them, and the more adventurous who wanted to continue the rather more
relaxed trend of the early 1960s. The leading literary journals took sides: Novy
Mir, under its editor Alexander Tvardovsky, took the liberal view that literature
should come out with the truth; Octyabr took the traditionalist view - its editor,
Vsevolod Kochetov, disapproved of de-Stalinization and wanted to see Stalin
rehabilitated. Before long it became clear that the conservatives were winning
the struggle; in February 1966 two writers, Andrei Sinyavski and Yuli Daniel, were
sentenced to seven and five years respectively in a labour camp for spreading
‘anti-Soviet propaganda’; Sinyavski had written On Socialist Realism, a devastating
criticism about life in the Soviet state. Daniel had produced a satirical story
meant as a warning against a return to Stalinism; it told the tale of a national
holiday on which the state allowed everybody to murder anyone they chose,
without punishment By about 1970 the progressives had been stifled, and
although Brezhnev would not go so far as to officially rehabilitate Stalin, it
became almost impossible to get anything published which was critical of him.
Historian Alexander Nekrich’s book about Stalin’s mishandling of the German
invasion in 1941 was published in 1965, but later withdrawn (see section 7.2(a)).
Nekrich could get nothing else published in the USSR; he was expelled from the
party in 1967 and eventually left the country. Other historians who encountered
problems were Roy Medvedev and Viktor Danilov; Medvedev wrote a book about
the Great Terror in which he revealed yet more horrifying details of Stalin’s
activities; Danilov wrote about collectivization, but both books were banned.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had
been permitted by Khrushchev, found that his next two novels, The First Circle
and Cancer Ward, were rejected. The Czechoslovak crisis affected all aspects of

Soviet life; dissidents were outraged at Soviet intervention, while the Soviet
authorities became increasingly nervous about the potential evils of liberal
attitudes. Tvardovsky was forced to leave Novy Mir in 1970, and many writers,
including Solzhenitsyn, were expelled from the Writers’ Union, which meant that
it was impossible for them to publish in the USSR.
This sort of treatment only served to make reform-minded intellectuals even
more determined to persevere. More and more writers began to circulate works
in typescript, which they knew had no chance of being published, around their
little groups; this was known as samizdat - self-publishing. In 1970 a Human
Rights Committee was formed by the physicists Andrei Sakharov and Valeri
Chalidze to protest, among other things, about the dreadful conditions which
still existed in labour camps, and to demand freedom of speech and the full
implementation of the constitution of the USSR. The KGB was also using a new
technique - confining dissidents in psychiatric hospitals or mental asylums,
where some were kept for many years. In May 1970 the biologist and writer
Zhores Medvedev, Roy's twin brother, was arrested and locked up in a mental
hospital in Kaluga. He was diagnosed as having ‘creeping schizophrenia’, but the
real reason for his arrest was that his writings were considered to be anti-Soviet.
According to Andrei Sakharov, ‘Zhores Medvedev's work in two disparate fields -
biology and political science - was regarded as evidence of a split personality,
and his conduct allegedly exhibited evidence of social maladjustment.’ Sakharov,
Roy Medvedev and Solzhenitsyn immediately launched a protest campaign which
attracted so much support that the authorities became alarmed and released
Zhores after only just over two weeks, which was unheard of; most people were
not so lucky.10 In 1973 the KGB mounted a campaign against Solzhenitsyp and
Sakharov which ended with Solzhenitsyn being deported from the country in
February 1974. The authorities would have liked to get rid of Sakharov too, but he
was such an eminent scientist with an international reputation that they dare not
put Soviet scientific links with American scientists at risk (Documents B and D).
The Human Rights Committee was given a new stick with which îo beat the
government when the USSR, along with the USA and other nations, signed the
Helsinki Final Treaty in 1975. One of the terms of this agreement provided for
economic and scientific co-operation, and the free exchange of information
between East and West; it meant that dissidents were now able to attract world
wide publicity for the fact that their government was reneging on its promises. By
the end of 1975 there were some 10,000 political and religious prisoners in labour
camps, as well as innumerable dissidents in psychiatric institutions. And yet the
Brezhnev regime stopped short of all-out suppression and terror; the Politburo
members could not forget that Stalin's purges had got out of hand, and to their
credit, they could not bring themselves to have the leading dissidents executed.
They accepted that the ideas of the dissidents could not be stifled entirely, but at
least they could be dampened down. In 1980 for example, when the Olympic
Games were held in Moscow, it was decided to move Sakharov to Gorky (for
merly Nizhny Novgorod), a town on the Volga to which foreigners were forbid
den to go. He remained there until 1986 when Gorbachev invited him to return to
Moscow. The dissident movement was weakened by divisions between the
various groups; the Medvedevs were Leninists who wanted to bring socialism
i
back to its pre-Stalin state; liberals like Sakharov came to believe that Western-
style democracy was the only way to safeguard the freedom of the individual;
Solzhenitsyn criticized almost every known form of government and ended up
extolling the virtues of two arguably contradictory positions - Christianity and
pre-revolutionary Tsarism. Although the dissident movement gained publicity, its
membership was small and the vast majority of ordinary people took no interest
in their activities. The public regarded the state with suspicion, but there was a
general apathy about politics; they knew that they were powerless to bring about
any general change. Most people spent their energies trying to make the best of
a bad situation and were more interested in the entertainment programmes
on television - sport, thrillers and variety shows - than in politics.11
9.3 Brezhnev and eastern Europe

(a) The crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1968
During the early 1960s Czechoslovakia began to experience economic difficulties,
and a rift developed between reformers and conservatives. The reformers
objected to the over-centralized Soviet control of their economy; for instance, it
seemed ludicrous that they should be forced to use poor-quality iron ore from
Siberia when they could have been importing high-grade ore from Sweden.
Brezhnev paid a visit to Prague in December 1967, but made no attempt to adju
dicate between the rival groups. In January 1968 the pro-Moscow leader, Antonin
Novotny, was forced to resign, and a reformer, Alexander Dubcek, was chosen as
the new party leader. Things began to change rapidly: censorship was removed,
and a programme of reforms was announced which included the setting-up of
retail markets; the de-centralization of industry, which meant that factories
would be run by works councils instead of being controlled from Prague by party
officials; the de-collectivization of farms, which would become independent
co-operatives; more powers for trade unions; more trade with the West; and free
dom to travel abroad. The fronder with West Germany, which had been closed
since 1948, was immediately opened. There was even talk of allowing the forma
tion of non-communist political parties. Dubcek still regarded himself as a
Leninist but believed that there should be freedom of speech and freedom of the
press, so that the communist party could be made aware of the wishes of the
people. His intention was that the country would remain communist, but he felt
that the party should earn the right to be in power by responding to public
opinion. He was also careful to assure Moscow that Czechoslovakia would stay in
the Warsaw Pact and would continue to be a reliable ally of the USSR. He called
this version of communism 'socialism with a human face,’ and as the programme
began to be introduced in the early months of 1968, it became known as the
Prague Spring.12
Dubcek’s reforms were extremely popular with the Czech people and led to
a great ferment of political discussions and public meetings; the media, especially
television, played a vital part in the debate. However, some of the Czech party
leaders felt that things were going too far. As for Brezhnev and the Politburo, they

watched developments anxiously; most of them had no desire to interfere, and in
fact at first some of them actually encouraged the Czechs in their reforms. It was
the formation of non-communist political parties and the criticisms of the USSR
which began to appear in the Czech press that convinced them that it was time to
put an end to the experiment. Leaders of some of the other satellite states, par
ticularly East Germany and Hungary, were also becoming nervous in case Czech
reformist ideas spread into their territories. After an ‘appeal for help' had been
received in Moscow from some of the Czech conservatives (a document which
remained locked in the archives until 1992), during the night of 20-21 August,
about half a million Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops with tanks crossed the border
into Czechoslovakia. There was virtually no resistance from the Czech army,
although hundreds of thousands of the public came out on the streets to protest
against the invading troops. Dubcek and other leaders were arrested and taken
to Moscow where they were forced to agree to drop the reform programme. The
reformers were gradually manoeuvred out and Dubcek was replaced as leader by
the conservative Gustav Husak, who would do as he was told by the USSR. Not all
the states of eastern Europe approved of the Soviet intervention; Yugoslavia and
Romania objected, and Tito paid a visit to Prague to encourage Dubcek, shortly
before the invasion.
Some historians see the Czech experiment as the way out of the dead-end of
Stalinism; it suggested that it was possible to reform the mess which commun
ism had got itself into, thanks to Stalin, and that ‘socialism with a human face'
could win popular support. If Dubcek had stopped short of multi-party politics
and overt criticism of Moscow, it could have been a turning-point for the whole
communist bloc. But the Soviet Politburo lacked the vision and the courage to
take the opportunity. The Soviet handling of the crisis had disastrous results:
Czechoslovakia had been probably the most pro-Soviet of all the satellite states,
but military intervention only succeeded in embittering the Czechs, and put
a stop to any further official moves towards reform in the eastern bloc. Soon
afterwards Brezhnev issued a statement which became known as theNBrezhnev
Doctrine, to the effect that the Warsaw Pact countries were not allowed to follow
policies involving any departure from a one-party state; if any developments
took place in any member country which seemed to be a threat to socialism, it
was the right and the duty of the other member states of the Pact to intervene mili
tarily in order to bring such dangerous developments to an end (Document A).13
The reform movement in Czechoslovakia had not been entirely subdued. In 1977
a human rights group known as Charter 77 was formed and it soon became
increasingly outspoken in its criticisms of the Husak government
(b) Trouble in Poland

The Communist government in Poland was also getting itself into difficulties;
with amazingly insensitive timing, it announced substantial increases in food
prices just before Christmas 1970. Such was the public outrage that riots broke
out; the Polish leader, Wladyslav Gomulka, resigned and was replaced by Edward
Gierek. The new government did not follow the example of Dubcek in Czechoslo
vakia and throughout the 1970s its handling of the economy was not especially
i \
successful. During the summer of 1980 there were serious food shortages, indus
trial unrest and strikes in the port of Gdansk and other cities. The strikes were
organized by an independent trade union movement led by Lech Walesa; calling
itself Solidarity, it began to challenge the communist party for the leadership of
the country. By the summer of 1981 the party seemed to have lost control and the
country was in chaos. But the communists, now led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski,
were determined to hold on to power. There were two alternatives: either the
communists regained control of the country, or Warsaw Pact forces would invade,
as they had in Czechoslovakia. In December 1981 Jaruzelski, with the approval of
Moscow, carried out a well-organized coup: order was restored, Solidarity was
banned, thousands of its members were arrested, and the government began to
introduce some mild reforms in order to ‘normalize’ the situation. However,
there was such enormous support for Solidarity that it simply could not be elimi
nated. It was the beginning of the end for communism in the satellite states.
Unless the economic situation improved there was bound to be more trouble; in
1988 there were more strikes and the process began in which Poland became the
first of the states of eastern Europe to reject communism.
9.4 Foreign affairs and d é te n te

(a) The USSR, the USA and d é te n te
Both states remained suspicious of each other; the increasing American involve
ment in the war in Vietnam, especially the continued bombing of communist
North Vietnam in the mid-1960s ordered by President Johnson, seemed to be
evidence of the dangers of capitalist aggression. Kosygin was actually on a visit to
Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, in February 1965 when the American bombing
began. It was then that the USSR decided to provide Ho Chi Minh, the communist
leader of North Vietnam, with financial aid and ground-to-air missiles. No sooner
had Johnson suspended the bombing for a time (March 1968) when the Soviet
intervention in Czechoslovakia took place (August 1968); for many Westerners
this was evidence of continuing communist expansionism. Probably the most
disturbing situation for Moscow was the deterioration of relations with China. In
March 1969 fighting broke out along their joint frontier in Siberia; full-scale war
seemed a distinct possibility for a time, but fortunately common sense prevailed
and a compromise settlement was reached. Given the uncertainty of the situation
with China in the Far East, Brezhnev and Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Minister,
tried to improve relations with the West. When Willy Brandt became West German
Chancellor in 1969, he brought with him a new policy - Ostpolitik - to aim for
better relations with East Germany and eastern Europe. He quickly suggested
talks and in August 1970 the USSR and the Federal Republic of Germany signed a
Renunciation of Force Treaty, accepting the 1945 frontiers of Germany and its
division into two states. In September 1971 a four-power agreement was reached
(USSR, USA, Britain and France) over West Berlin, which was to be ‘an independ
ent political entity’ under the sovereignty of neither East nor West Germany.
These agreements were a remarkable step forward, removing one of the greatest

obstacles to the improvement of East-West relations; they can be seen as the
beginning of détente. Andrei Gromyko was full of praise for Brandt's courage and
determination to move forward. On the German side the general mood was so
upbeat that the Federal Republic's Foreign Minister, Walter Scheel, told
Gromyko, much to the latter's'embarrassment, that he and his wife had decided
to call their newly-born daughter Andrea, in his honour.14
At the same tíme the arms race was continuing. The Soviet aim was to draw
level with the USA so that they could negotiate a reduction of tension - and of
armaments - from a position of strength. The more deeply the Americans
became involved in the Vietnam War (between 1961 and 1973), the less they
spent on nuclear weapons. By the early 1970s the Soviets had probably overtaken
them in numbers of inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-
launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs); the Soviets had also developed the anti-
ballistic missile (ABM) which could destroy enemy missiles before they reached
their targets. The Soviet navy had been transformed to make the USSR into
a great sea power. However, in 1970 the Americans introduced the multiple inde
pendently targetable re-entry vehicle (MIRV); this was a missile that could carry
as many as fourteen separate warheads, each one of which could be programmed
to hit a different target. The cost of all this nuclear stockpiling was astronomical
for both sides, and so in November 1969 talks began between the USSR and the
USA to try and agree on some limits. In May 1972 Brezhnev and President Nixon
signed a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (known as SALT I) in Moscow. It put
numerical limits on each side's ICBMs and SLBMs, although nothing was
decided about MIRVs. But the important thing was that the agreement slowed
down the arms race, and the term 1détente' began to be used to signify that East-
West relations had progressed beyond mere co-existence into a new phase of
considerably reduced tensions. The USA promised to carry out more trade with
the USSR, and both sides agreed to continue arms limitation talks and to consult
regularly about world affairs (Document C). Brezhnev went to New York in 1973,
and Nixon came to Moscow again in 1974; his successor, Gerald Ford, àlso visited
the USSR, meeting Brezhnev in Vladivostock in November 1974. One practical
outcome of détente was an increase in scientific and technological exchange
between East and West.
The USA suffered a number of serious setbacks in the first half of the 1970s
which worked to the advantage of the USSR. In 1970 a Marxist, Salvador Allende,
was elected President of Chile. American public opinion turned against the
Vietnam War, since it was now clear that the communists could not be defeated.
In 1973 Nixon admitted failure by withdrawing American troops from Vietnam.
In August 1974 Nixon himself was forced to resign in disgrace following the
Watergate scandal, and in April 1975 the North Vietnamese overran South
Vietnam, making the whole country communist. Vietnam soon made it clear that
it supported the USSR’s version of communism rather than China's. In the same
year, pro-communist governments were established in Laos and Cambodia, and
the American attempt to prevent the spread of communism in south-east Asia
had ended in complete failure. When both Nixon and Ford persevered in their
attempts to bring about closer relations between the USA and China, the
Politburo took it as a sign that the USA was feeling fragile and needed Chinese
I V
Support. Many Americans looked with suspicion on Soviet activities in Africa;
they transported Cuban forces to Angola to help Marxist guerrillas, and sup
ported the new left-wing government in Ethiopia. In January 1979 the USA lost
a valuable ally when fundamentalist Muslims drove out the pro-American shah
of Iran. There was a growing feeling in the USA that the USSR was gaining
ground; Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy
Carter, had been consistently hostile to the Soviet state, and he believed that the
Americans had to win back the strategic advantage over the USSR. Détente began
to falter and the arms race continued. In 1977 the Russians brought out their ver
sion of the MIRV, known as the SS-20, which they targeted on western Europe.
The USA responded by basing Cruise missiles in Britain and West Germany and
Pershing II missiles in West Germany. Yet at the same time talks were being held
on limiting nuclear weapons; Carter and Brezhnev met in Vienna in June 1979
and signed a SALT II agreement.
Meanwhile Soviet relations with China had become more complicated;
although Mao Zedong, a difficult man to deal with, had died in 1976, his successors
seemed no more amenable. In February 1979 the Chinese invaded Vietnam,
which was now a strong ally of the USSR. The attack was partly in retaliation for
the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea (formerly Cambodia) in December 1978,
in which the Vietnamese, with the full backing of the USSR, had overthrown the
vicious Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot, a protégé of China. The Chinese attack
turned out to be a short, sharp exercise; their troops withdrew from Vietnam after
three weeks; according to Beijing, they had Taught the Vietnamese a lesson.’ The
communist world was in disarray, and both the USSR and China seemed to be
vying for the support of the USA against each other. But relations between the
USSR and the USA took a decisive turn for the worse when Soviet troops entered
Afghanistan at the end of December 1979; the Cold War reached a new crisis, and
unfortunately the United States Senate refused to ratify SALT II.15
(b) The USSR and Afghanistan

There was a long history of good relations between the USSR and Afghanistan,
with its population of some 20 million Muslims. Its long northern frontier
bordered on the Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In
April 1978 a group of left-wing army officers seized power in the name of the
Democratic People’s Party. There seems to be no definite evidence that the USSR
had actually organized the coup, but they certainly gave ‘advice’ and promised to
back the new regime if the coup was successful. The new government of Nur
Muhammad Taraki planned to modernize the country, introducing land reform,
bringing an end to the ancient feudal practices, and setting up a socialist system.
However, in a country where Islamic authority was strong, changes such as equal
status for men and women and the secularization of society were seen as an
affront to the Islamic religion. The reforms aroused great opposition and civil
war developed. Several thousand Soviet troops were sent to help Taraki, but the
fighting intensified. To complicate matters, Taraki fell out with his Foreign
Minister, Hafizullah Amin, who wanted power for himself. In September 1979
Taraki tried to have Amin murdered, but the attempt was bungled, and Amin had

enough support to turn the tables and have Taraki arrested. After Taraki was
strangle^ in prison, on Amin’s orders, Amin became President. Brezhnev was
shocked at all this treachery and the Politburo decided that the militant Amin
must be removed and replaced by a more moderate Marxist. A special military
unit was sent to defend Amin’s residence and protect Amin,' but it stormed his
palace in Kabul and Amin and his family were killed (December 1979). The
following day more Soviet troops crossed the border from Tajikistan; by the
beginning of January 1980 there were 50,000 of them in Afghanistan, and a new
Marxist leader, Babrak Karmal, was installed in Kabul. It was expected that the
Soviet troops would remain for a year or perhaps eighteen months ‘until full
stabilization is achieved.’16
Soviet motives for intervention were quite clear: they were reluctant to allow
the overthrow of a pro-Soviet Marxist regime once it had been established; it was
their ‘international duty' to support struggling fellow communists (Document E).
There was also the very real fear that the regime would be overthrown by an
Islamic fundamentalist revolution like the one which had seized power in Iran in
January 1979. This might stir up the millions of Muslims who were Soviet citizens
and so destabilize those republics with substantial Muslim populations. The
Politburo was probably encouraged by the fact that the USA was still suffering
from the ‘post-Vietnam syndrome’, which meant that they were reluctant to
commit troops abroad, and by the fact that the new radical Muslim regime of the
Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the neighbouring state to Afghanistan, was strongly
anti-American. But it turned out to be a disastrous decision: instead of being
there for eighteen months, it was almost ten years - February 1989 - before
Soviet troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan. Although at the peak there were
109,000 Soviet troops involved, they failed to defeat the Muslim opposition (see
section 10.2(b)), and at least 15,000 Soviet troops were killed. In the short term
the USSR’s action put an end to détente; unlike Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan was
not a country which was regarded internationally as part of the Soviet sphere of
influence. President Carter was outraged; he ordered an increase in tße defence
budget, stopped the export of grain from the USA to the USSR and withdrew the
American team from the Olympic Games held in Moscow in the summer of 1980.
The US Senate refused to ratify SALT II. The American Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) did its best to help the Afghan Muslims, as did China, and this placed
another obstacle in the way of Soviet-Chinese reconciliation. Afghanistan turned
out to be the USSR’s Vietnam; in the words of Volkogonov: ‘the country was in
a trap from which it could escape only by frankly admitting that the whole idea of
a mission to Afghanistan had been a mistake, and by withdrawing its troops.’17
9.5 The end of an era

(a) Brezhnev departs
By the end of the 1970s Brezhnev’s health was in serious decline; he had already
suffered several strokes and two mild heart attacks. He ought to have retired, but
he enjoyed the trappings of power and was easily persuaded to stay on by some
\ \
of his colleagues in the Politburo who seemed anxious to postpone the time
when a decision would have to be made about the succession. In reality the
Politburo - especially Suslov, Gromyko, Ustinov, Andropov and Chernenko -
were taking most of the important decisions. Brezhnev's last two years in office
were unhappy and humiliating for him; there were a number of embarrassing
public appearances when he had extreme difficulty simply reading out the
speeches written for him. On one occasion when he was visiting the Transcau
casian republics, he read out in Georgia the speech which had been written for
Armenia, without noticing the difference. Since it was televised live, the whole
country realized just how senile their leader was; it later emerged that one of his
aides had switched the speeches deliberately in order to discredit Brezhnev.
It was common knowledge in Moscow that whenever Brezhnev came into the
capital, the last limousine in his motorcade was always a resuscitation vehicle.
Another painful experience for him was that during the KGB’s anti-corruption
drive, information came out about unsavoury activities among his own family
and supporters. His daughter Galina, who was married to General Yuri Chur-
banov, a deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, was having an affair with the director
of the Moscow State Circus, and they were involved in a huge network of jewel
and gold bullion smuggling, bribery and currency speculation. It was a sad end to
Brezhnev's career that he should have become an object of pity and the butt of
cruel jokes. There was a popular story about his speech-writer being chastized
for making one of his speeches too long; T said that I wanted a speech which
lasted ten minutes,' complained Brezhnev; 'this one lasted for twenty.' 'But
Comrade Brezhnev,’ replied the unfortunate assistant, T told you I was giving
you two copies.' His love of medals was well known - he had awarded himself
quite a few; a rumour went round that he was about to have surgery on his chest
so that there would be room for more medals. Another anecdote told of a visit to
Brezhnev by his mother who was worried about his luxurious lifestyle, especially
his collection of Western motor cars, said to number at least 50; ‘but Lyonya,’ she
asked, 'what will you do if the Bolsheviks come back?’ On 7 November 1982
Brezhnev attended the annual parade to celebrate the October revolution; it was
bitterly cold, but he stood throughout the whole ceremony and took the salute. It
all proved too much for him and he died three days later.
Brezhnev has not had a good press among historians; there seems to be
general agreement that he allowed stability to degenerate into stagnation. He
lacked the vision to see what needed to be done to modernize the state, or even
to recognize fully what the problems were. According to Robert Service, ‘policy
was so motionless that it was rarely a topic for glancing comment in Pravda or
even in the scholarly economic journals... Only very dimly were Brezhnev and
his colleagues aware that doing nothing was a recipe for political disaster.’18All
through his long period in power Brezhnev’s main concern seemed to be to keep
the ‘nomenklatura’- the ruling elite - happy. They were the holders of important
posts who were chosen first and foremost because of their political reliability and
devotion to the party, rather than technical or administrative abilities. At the
lowest level of the nomenklatura were the administrators of town or city party
committees, and the next level was the regional (oblast) committee; there were
posts in the secretariat of the Central Committee and in the parties and committees

of the republics; the highest posts were in the secretariat of the Politburo. Then
there we*e the posts which the party considered most important in the various
organizations like Komsomol, the academic institutions, the ministries, the eco
nomic bodies, the police and the KGB. They also included managers of factories
and collective farms and some bf the leading research experts in universities. The
system had taken shape under Stalin and people had come into it from a variety
of backgrounds - including peasants and industrial workers; they had been
promoted because they were party members and because they were totally loyal
to the party. They were rewarded with privileges and power; these were the
people who became alarmed at Khrushchev’s reforms, and who in the end did all
they could to slow them down and sabotage them. Brezhnev gave them what
they most wanted - stability and security of tenure - and he did not trouble them
with radical changes. Unlike Khrushchev, he did not sack them for their failures,
but told them that he trusted them and understood the difficulties under which
they were working. Many of these people were extremely powerful locally and
were able to get away with ignoring any orders from Moscow which did not
appeal to them. The longer this went on, the more powerful and corrupt the elite
became, and the more difficult it would be for Brezhnev’s successors to reform
the system. In the words of Dmitri Volkogonov, who experienced this at first
hand as a member of the nomenklatura: ’The Communist ship of state was
becalmed, its sails sagging. Party rule in the centre and the periphery was charac
terized by the outward appearance of activity concealing internal passivity...
Corruption flourished at every level, the higher, the worse. Deceit and lies
became the rule... to which Brezhnev, being a mild soul, tended to turn a blind
eye, even when his own relations were involved in unseemly operations.’1^
Yet there were some positive aspects of the Brezhnev era; the man himself, in
spite of his vanity, had many good qualities. Volkogonov recalled that, unlike
Stalin, he actually liked people, he was approachable and would often help
somebody outside his immediate circle ’who had touched his heart with a sad
story or a request.’ Even when he criticized somebody he did it in such'a way that
he never left them feeling offended. ’In some ways Brezhnev was a kind of good
tsar, a Communist tsar, and if it had not been for Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan
and Poland, history’s view of him might be very different.’-20 J.N. Westwood
points out that 'on the whole, his regime was benevolent, with a perceptible
attitude of live-and-let-live.’Although he was criticized for allowing stagnation to
develop, this at least gave the people something they had lacked for four
decades: stability. In some ways the Brezhnev regime actually did better than the
West: 'after all, although the claim that there was no unemployment and no
inflation in the USSR was exaggerated, these two scourges were unobtrusive
minor irritants rather than the large-scale demoralizing phenomena of the West
ern world of the 1970s.’21 The unfortunate thing, from the point of view of the
survival of Communism, was that Brezhnev, the Politburo and the ruling elite all
grew old together. In 1980 the majority of members of the Politburo were well
over 70 and had been reluctant to prepare a younger generation of politicians to
take over from them. Similarly in the elite, the nomenklatura, the next generation
of officials were now middle-aged and were still being denied promotion. They
felt restless and resentful, and yet given the Soviet system, there was no way for
i '
them to express their dissatisfaction. They felt that Brezhnev and his ageing
cronies should go, but there was no mechanism to bring this about, except to try
and embarrass them into retirement. In the end ‘his General Secretaryship had
turned into a ceremonial reign that had brought Communism into its deepest
contempt since 1917.’22
(b) Interlude: Andropov and Chernenko

(November 1982-March 1985)
Brezhnev wanted his favourite crony, Konstantin Chernenko, to succeed him;
but Yuri Andropov had other ideas. He had been head of the KGB for 15 years,
and as part of his anti-corruption drive he had been doing his best to discredit
Brezhnev, his family and his close associates, hoping to spoil Chernenko's
chances of coming to power. His plans were successful and the Politburo chose
him as the next General Secretary. Bom in Stavropol (Northern Caucasus) in
1914 into a Cossack family, he was highly intelligent and progressed quickly
through Komsomol and party ranks, becoming Soviet ambassador to Hungary in
1954. It was Brezhnev who appointed him as KGB leader. He was a serious and
austere character, and a passionately convinced Marxist-Leninist who strongly
disapproved of Brezhnev's apparent lack of commitment to the cause. He recog
nized that changes were essential, but he felt he had to be cautious so that he
could carry the Politburo with him. One of his first measures was a drive for
greater efficiency and tighter discipline in all spheres of activity, with a campaign
against poor workmanship, absenteeism, alcoholism, corruption and the black
market. He started to replace members of the nomenklatura, a reform which was
long overdue, and by the time of his death in February 1984, he had already
replaced about a fifth of party secretaries and ministers, and about a third of
department heads on the secretariat of the Central Committee. He intended, he
said, to talk to as many different people as possible in order to pick up new ideas,
and he began by visiting a Moscow factory and talking to workers. But tragically
Andropov’s health soon deteriorated; for some years he had been suffering
kidney trouble, and this suddenly became worse, forcing him to spend hours
wired up to a dialysis machine.
Andropov's short reign was clouded by failures in foreign affairs. He invited US
President Reagan to a summit meeting to discuss arms reduction and a ban on
further nuclear tests. Reagan’s reply was a complete rebuff; he said that the USSR
was an ‘evil empire’ and in March 1983 announced a new project - a Strategic
Defence Initiative (known as ‘Star Wars’) which would use weapons based in
space to destroy ballistic missiles. Then in September 1983 there was an inter
national incident when Soviet forces shot down a South Korean airliner which
had strayed into Soviet airspace; all 269 passengers and crew were killed. Tension
between the USSR and the USA and NATO reached new heights (Document F).
By this time Andropov was seriously ill and on 9 February 1984 he died after only
15 months in office. It is hardly possible to say what the results would have been
if he could have lived another five or six years, as he had hoped. Roy Medvedev
feels that he could have achieved great things, but others believe that his reforms
were not radical enough to save the system.

Andropov had encouraged and promoted reform-minded people —Mikhail
Gorbachev, Yegor Ligachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov were all appointed as Central
Committee Secretaries. When Andropov realized that he probably had only
a short time to live, he tried to make sure that Gorbachev would succeed him. He
sent written instructions to this'effect to the Central Committee, but Chernenko's
supporters intercepted them and Andropov died before he could take any further
action. The Politburo chose Konstantin Chernenko as next Secretary-General,
although he was 72 years old and already terminally ill with emphysema and
hepatitis. He had had an undistinguished career in the party and owed his rise to
the fact that for many years he had been a personal assistant to Brezhnev. It
seems incredible that the Politburo should have chosen such a man, who was
intellectually limited, and so weak that he could hardly speak coherently, to be
leader of their state. One suggested explanation is that the majority wanted
somebody who would abandon the anti-corruption campaign and leave them in
peace and quiet. Chernenko was just the man; he had no ideas of changing
anything or even much awareness that things needed to change. As Dmitri
Volkogonov puts it: ‘Chernenko was not capable of leading the country or the
Party into the future. His rise to power symbolized the deepening of the crisis in
society, the total lack of positive ideas in the Party, and the inevitability of the
convulsions to come.'23After only 13 months in office, much of the time too ill to
attend Politburo meetings, he died in March 1985.
Documents
(A) An article in Pravda, 26 September 1968, explaining the Brezhnev Doctrine.
There is no doubt that the peoples of the socialist countries and the
Communist parties have and must have freedom to determine their country’s
path to development. However, any decision of theirs must damage neither
socialism in their own country nor the fundamental interests of other socialist
countries... This means that every Communist party is responsible not only
to its own people but also to all the socialist countries and the entire Communist
movement. Whoever forgets this is placing sole emphasis on the autonomy
and independence of Communist Parties, lapses into one-sidedness, shirking
his internationalist obligations... Just as, in V.I. Lenin’s words, someone living
in a system of other states constituting a socialist commonwealth cannot be
free of the common interests of that commonwealth.
Source: quoted in John Laver, The USSR 1945-90, p. 38.
(B) Andrei Sakharov writes in his memoirs about an essay he had written in 1968.
I gave my essay the title Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence,

and Intellectual Freedom.. .1 wanted to alert my readers to the grave perils
»'
threatening the human race - thermonuclear extinction, ecological catastrophe,
famine, an uncontrolled population explosion, alienation... I argued for a
rapprochement of the socialist and capitalist systems that could eliminate or
substantially reduce these dangers which had been increased many times
over by the division of the world into opposing camps. Economic, social and
ideological convergence should bring about a scientifically governed, demo
cratic, pluralist society free of intolerance and dogmatism, a humanitarian
society which would care for the Earth and its future, and would embody the
positive features of both systems... I sent a copy to Brezhnev... on July 22 it
was published in the New York Times... It circulated widely in the USSR as
well - samizdat was flourishing - and the response was encouraging.
Source: Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs» pp. 282-9.
(C) Extracts from the agreement signed by the USSR and the USA, 29 May 1972-the
beginning of détente.
1. They will proceed from the common determination that in the nuclear age
there is no alternative to conducting their mutual relations on the basis of
peaceful co-existence. Differences in ideology and in the social systems of the
USSR and the USA are not obstacles to the bilateral development of normal
relations based on the principles of sovereignty, equality, non-interference in
internal affairs and mutual advantage.
2. The USSR and the USA will do their utmost to avoid military confrontations
and to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war. They will always exercise restraint
in their mutual relations, and will be prepared to negotiate and settle dif
ferences by peaceful means.
3. The USSR and the USA have a special responsibility to do everything in their
power so that conflicts or situations will not arise which would serve to
increase international tensions. Accordingly they will seek to promote con
ditions in which all countries will live in peace and security and will not be
subject to outside interference in their internal affairs.
Source: quoted in Laver, pp. 38-9.
(D) Sakharov recalls his work with the Human Rights Committee.
The Human Rights Committee met regularly during the winter and spring of
1971, the heyday of its activity. Igor Shafarevich, a mathematician and a member
of the Academy of Sciences, volunteered to take part in the Committee’s work.
He was particularly disturbed by the misuse of psychiatry, by religious perse
cution and by other actions which violate the victims’ spiritual integrity. The
Committee’s report, which denounced the misuse of psychiatry, was adopted
(icontinued)

in July 1971. But still earlier I had followed the case of Viktor Fainberg, one of
the participants in the Red Square demonstration ofAugust 25,1968. ‘Volunteer
policemen’ (in fact, KGB agents) knocked out some of his teeth in the course
of arresting him, which would have made it embarrassing to try him in open
court. Fainberg, who had received psychiatric care as a child, was thereupon
ruled mentally incompetent and sent to the Leningrad special psychiatric
hospital... Special psychiatric hospitals are operated by the Ministry of Internal
Affairs and they have harsh regimens. Convicts are employed as orderlies.
Beatings are frequent. Painful proceedings and drugs which have no therapeutic
value are used to pacify the inmates and punish them ... Fainberg and his
friend Vladimir Borisov smuggled notes out of the hospital describing merciless
beatings, the wrapping of unruly patients in wet canvas, which causes excru
ciating pain as it dries and shrinks, and other horrors. When they declared
a hunger strike, they were beaten and subjected to daily forced feeding.
Source: A. Sakharov, Memoirs, pp. 327-8.
(E) Alexander Bovin, editor of Izvestiya and former Central Committee member,
defends the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in an article in Izvestiya, April,
1980.
Developments forced us to make a choice: we had either to bring in troops or

let the Afghan revolution be defeated and the country turned into a kind of
Shah’s Iran. We decided to bring in the troops. It was not a simple decision to
take... We knew that the victory of counter-revolution would pave the way for
massive American military presence in a country which borders on the Soviet
Union and that this was a challenge to our country’s security. We knew that the
decision to bring in the troops would not be popular in the modem world even
if it was absolutely legal. But we also knew that we would have ceased to be
a great power if we refrained from taking extraordinary decisions prompted by
extraordinary circumstances... There are situations where non-intervention
is a disgrace and a betrayal. Such a situation developed in Afghanistan. And
when I hear the voices of protest from people who claim to be democrats,
humanists and even revolutionaries, saying they are outraged by Soviet ‘inter
vention’, I tell them this: If you are against Soviet military aid to Afghanistan,
then you are for the victory of counter-revolution. There is no third way.
Source: quoted in Laver, p. 40.
(F) Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, defends the shooting down of the
South Korean airliner in August 1983.
On the coming to power of the Reágan administration, tension in Soviet-US

relations increased, with a resultant cooling in the international climate. The
»V
new US government did everything it could to undo the work of its predeces
sors, striking blows at one agreement after another, either emasculating them
or, as in the case of SALT-II, declaring them defunct.
Then came a certain night in August 1983 when a South Korean airliner that
had blatantly violated the Soviet state border was shot down... This was only
a few days before the final stage of the Foreign Ministers’ meeting on
European security which was taking place in Madrid, and the response from
Washington was a wave of insinuations against the USSR, brazenly exploiting
the incident for propaganda purposes...
[In conversation with American Secretary of State George Shultz] I set out
the Soviet point of view: ‘We accuse the American side of carrying out a ser
ious and premeditated action against the Soviet Union. How could the plane
accidentally divert from the established corridor of five hundred kilometres,
not towards international waters but towards the Soviet border, over vitally
important military territory in the Soviet Far East, and penetrate and fly in
Soviet airspace for more than two hours? Why did this plane not obey warning
signals and the order to land which were given in strict accordance with inter
national law and Soviet law?’
Shultz made no reply to any of my questions. I concluded: ‘That is why we
accuse the US administration of organizing a criminal act against the USSR,
only one of many such attacks on us.’ That was virtually the end of my talk
with Shultz. It was probably the sharpest exchange I ever had with an
American Secretary of State, and I have had talks with fourteen of them.
Source: Andrei Gromyko, Memories, pp. 296-300.
Notes
1. Dmitri Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall o f the Soviet Empire, pp. 264,266.
2. Alec Nove, 'Agriculture', in A. Brown and M. Kaser (editors), Soviet Policies for the 1980s,
pp. 170-1; Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 1917-1991, p. 379; and pp. 378-93
for more details of economic policies under Brezhnev.
4. J.N. Westwood, Endurance and Endeavour. Russian History 1812-1992, p. 431.
5. Service, p. 410.
6. Westwood, p. 600.
8. Statistics in this section are from Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, p. 18; Westwood,
pp. 456-7; Service, p. 409; and McCauley, pp. 297-302.
9. Brown, p. 18.
10. Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, pp. 310-12.
11. Service, pp. 416-420.
12. For full coverage, see K. Dawisha, The Kremlin and the Prague Spring.
13. There is a good general survey in R.L Hutchings, Soviet-East European Relations:
Consolidation and Conflict 1968-1980.
14. Andrei Gromyko, Memories, pp. 197-201.
15. Adam Ulam, Dangerous Relations: The Soviet Union in World Politics 1970-1982 is highly
recommended. Also Richard D. Anderson, Public Politics in an Authoritarian State:

Making Foreign Policy During the Brezhnev Years; and R. Edmonds, Soviet Foreign Policy:
the Brçzhnev Years.
17. Ibid., p. 462.
18. Service, pp. 408-9.
20. Ibid., pp. 306-7.
21. Westwood, pp. 460,466.
22. Service, p. 427.
» \

MZ 10 Gorbachev and the end o f the
Soviet Union, 19 8 5 - 19 9 1
Summary of events
Mikhail Gorbachev was the last Soviet leader, the man who presided over the end
of communist rule in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the collapse of
the USSR at the end of 1991. When he came to power in March 1985 at the com
paratively young age of 54, he was determined to modernize the Soviet system,
which had been stagnating for the previous 20 years. However, at the beginning
he had no clear idea of exactly what needed to be done, and he knew that what
ever changes he tried to introduce would be opposed by members of the party
and the government bureaucracy, if their privileged positions were threatened.
He began cautiously, building up a team of like-minded reformers; but progress
was slow, and he eventually decided that economic reforms could only be achieved
if political reform accompanied them. The communist party began to divide
itself into those, like Gorbachev, who thought that the party must modernize to
survive, and those who were afraid that reform would weaken the control of the
party and threaten their elite positions. Gorbachev's new thinking included:
• uskorenie acceleration, particularly in the economy;

• glasnost openness or frankness;
• perestroika restructuring - of the party, the economy and the government;
• democratization which began early in 1989 with elections for local Soviets
and the creation of an elected Congress of People’s Deputies.
• changes in foreign policy: he hoped to bring an end to the arms race and the
threat of nuclear confrontation, both for economic and moral reasons;
• a new approach to the satellite states of eastern Europe - they should be free
to choose their own political systems.
The West found such ideas startling, to say the least, coming from a Soviet leader,
and at first Western leaders tended to be sceptical of his intentions. British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher was one of the first international leaders to comment
favourably. After their first meeting, shortly before he became General-Secretary,
she remarked, T like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.' In the end
he won them all over, even US Presidents Reagan and Bush, the arch-enemies
of communism. Some of his policies were brilliantly successful, especially the
development of the USSR’s closer relationship with the West. The USA responded
positively to his initiatives, and the Soviet decision to withdraw from Afghanistan
Gorbachev and the end of the Soviet Union 401

in April 1989 helped to bring an end to the Cold War. During 1989-90 when the
states ofêastern Europe dropped their communist governments, Gorbachev
refused to intervene; he even went along with the reunification of Germany in
October 1990. It was at this point that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Although Gorbachev was extremely popular abroad, he was having increasing
problems at home, and by the autumn of 1989 his popularity had collapsed dra
matically. At the usual May Day celebrations in Moscow in 1990, he was booed
off the rostrum. Criticism came from all sides:
• The army and the traditionalists (conservatives or hard-liners) in the communist

party were outraged that Gorbachev had 'lost' eastern Europe without putting
up a fight, and worst of all that he had allowed Germany to be reunited.
• The traditionalists were appalled at the way the party was being deprived of its
power; they thought Gorbachev’s political changes were going too far, espe
cially on 6 March 1990 when he persuaded the Congress of People’s Deputies
to amend Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution; the changes meant that the
communist party had lost its monopoly of power in the USSR.
• The more radical reformers, like Boris Yeltsin, thought that Gorbachev was
moving too slowly and wanted more decisive action.
• Gorbachev’s economic reforms were a failure; an economic crisis had been
gathering momentum since 1987 and had reached disastrous proportions by
1989. Everything was in short supply, the shops were empty, and everybody
blamed Gorbachev.
• Increasing nationalism became a serious problem for Gorbachev, as many of
the 15 republics making up the USSR began to demand independence.-Ttiese
developments were encouraged by Yeltsin, who was elected president of the
Russian republic in June 1991. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were now bitter rivals
for power. The three Baltic republics - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - declared
themselves independent, and the three Transcaucasian republics - Armenia,
Azerbaijan and Georgia - were thinking along the same lines. The ÍFSSR was
beginning to fall apart.
Gorbachev meanwhile veered from the left wing of the party towards the right,
and back again, trying to muster sufficient support for his policies. His main
concern by this time was to preserve the USSR in some form or other. In July
he reached an agreement with Yeltsin, and other republican leaders on the
formation of a new USSR - the Union of Sovereign Socialist States - in which the
republics had much more power. This new Union Treaty was due to be formally
signed on 20 August 1991. However, a group of traditional right-wing Commun
ists decided they had had enough of Gorbachev; they wanted to save the party
and the Union and they planned a coup to overthrow him and prevent the sign
ing of the Treaty. Gorbachev was placed under house arrest in his holiday dacha
in the Crimea, but Yeltsin led the opposition to the conspirators, and the attempt
failed. Gorbachev was able to return to Moscow, but his days in power were
numbered. The communist party had discredited itself by trying to overthrow
Gorbachev and put the clock back. Yeltsin banned the communist party in the
Russian republic, and both Russia and Ukraine decided not to sign the Union
I V
Treaty. In December 1991 Yeltsin and the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus
declared that the USSR was dissolved and set up instead a weak association of
former Soviet republics, known as the Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS). This new organization was to have no president, and consequently
Gorbachev was out of a job. The USSR formally ceased to exist at midnight on
31 December 1991.
• What were Gorbachev’s intentions? Did he intend to destroy the com

munist party?
• Why did the Soviet economy prove so difficult to reform?
• Was it a mistake to give the states of eastern Europe 'freedom of choice’?
• Why did Gorbachev and Yeltsin fail to work together successfully?
• Should Gorbachev be regarded as a complete failure?
• Was communism capable of being reformed?
• Why did communism survive in China but not in the USSR?
• Could the USSR have been saved?
10.1 The struggle for reform

(a) Gorbachev gathers his team
Mikhail Gorbachev was bom into a peasant family in the Stavropol region of
the Northern Caucasus in 1931. His father was a tractor and combine harvester
driver; during harvest periods, as a teenager, Mikhail helped his father, and at
the age of 17 he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. At school
he was a bright pupil and was accepted at Moscow State University where he
graduated in Law. Returning to Stavropol, he became Komsomol first secretary
in 1956, and by 1970 he had risen to become party first secretary for the Stavropol
region. After coming to the notice of Andropov, he rose quickly - Central Com
mittee member in 1971 and full member of the Politburo in 1980, at the age of
only 49, an unheard-of achievement for those days. During his first few years in
the Politburo, Gorbachev managed to give the impression that he was a tradi
tionalist at heart, though he had dropped some hints that he had radical reform
in mind. For example, in a speech in December 1984 he used the terms glasnost
(openness), perestroika (restructuring) and uskorenie (acceleration); he even
talked about 'democratization'. However, he must not have alarmed his elderly
colleagues too seriously: after Chernenko's death in March 1985, Gorbachev
was the unopposed choice as next General Secretary. Veteran Foreign Minister
Gromyko (known as 'Grim Grom') led the way in proposing Gorbachev and was
full of praise for his talents. There seemed to be a feeling in the country and in the
party Central Committee that it was time for a younger and more energetic leader.
In private, however, Gorbachev had been much more open; on a visit to Canada
in 1983 he had told Alexander Yakovlev, the Soviet ambassador in Ottawa, that

‘society had to change, it had to be constructed on different principles.' In
December 1984, in conversation with Eduard Shevardnadze, who was soon to
become Soviet Foreign Minister, Gorbachev had agreed that ‘everything’s rotten.
It has to be changed.’ Gorbachev himself remarked to his wife, Raisa, the evening
before he was chosen as leader,“We can't go on living in this way.’1He knew that
the country needed to be modernized and revitalized; agriculture and industry
somehow had to be reformed to make them more productive; in foreign affairs
he was anxious to revive détente and to extricate the Soviet Union from Afghanistan;
and the communist party, which had become set in its ways and attitudes, would
also have to be changed. He acknowledged the need for greater social justice,
a greater role for the soviets, and more participation by workers at the workplace.
At first Gorbachev had no great visionary plan; he knew that he had to tread care
fully so as not to antagonize the traditionalists; the changes must be controlled
from above. He believed that all these objectives could be achieved within the
framework of the Marxist-Leninist one-party state. He apparently could not
believe that both the party and the people might not choose to follow him in his
modernization of Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet system. But as it turned out,
the party apparatus was very slow to respond to the pressure for reform. It was
only very late in the day - after the coup of August 1991, when the traditionalists
tried to overthrow him - that Gorbachev admitted that the party could not be
the vehicle for restructuring the USSR.
His first goal was to build up a team of supporters and get rid of likely oppon
ents. By the end of his first year in office he had manoeuvred a majority for
himself in the Politburo, bringing in Yegor Ligachev, Nikolai Ryzkhov, Viktor
Chebrikov and Eduard Shevardnadze, and removing several members wha were
hostile to him, including Viktor Grishin, the Moscow party boss, who was so
corrupt that he was known as the Godfather. Shevardnadze was made Foreign
Minister in place of the elderly Gromyko, who became Soviet president, and
Boris Yeltsin became a candidate member of the Politburo. Gorbachev also
replaced 14 out of 23 heads of departments, and 39 out of 101 Soviet ministers;
his close ally and adviser, Alexander Yakovlev, was put in charge of culture and
propaganda. In the area of personnel changes, Gorbachev had achieved in one
year as much as Khrushchev achieved in five. The Secretary-General surrounded
himself with reform-minded aides such as Anatoly Chemyaev, who had taught
History at Moscow University for a time before joining the party apparatus, and
Georgy Shakhnazarov, a man of many talents - poet, writer of science fiction and
an expert on political science. Both Chemyaev and Shakhnazarov had worked in
Prague on the World Marxist Review. Many of these people had been admirers of
Khrushchev; and now at last, 20 years later, came Gorbachev, a bright new star,
one of whose slogans was ‘acceleration’.
(b) First attem pts at perestroika

Perestroika - the restructuring of the economy, society and the party - was
Gorbachev’s answer to the country’s problems. However, during his first two
years in power, no very dramatic changes took place. The leadership simply did
not realize how serious the economic crisis was in 1985; there had been virtually
t v
no growth since 1974. It was decided therefore that if more investment was
concentrated in the machine-building, electrical engineering and electronics
sector, that would effectively modernize the technical base of the economy. In the
Twelfth Five-Year Plan (1986-90) investment was set to increase by 23.6 per cent;
the targets were a 25 per cent increase in industrial production, a 14.4 per cent
increase in agricultural production, and a 14 per cent increase in real incomes
per head.2The first major agricultural reform was one that Gorbachev had had in
mind for some time: he set up one large ministry - the State Committee for the
Agro-Industrial Complex (known as Gosagroprom) - to replace the group of
ministries which had previously looked after different aspects of agriculture. Its
function was to organize the entire business of food cultivation and processing.
Unfortunately, Gosagroprom soon developed into yet another large bureaucracy
and achieved hardly any of the results which Gorbachev and his advisers had
hoped for. Another idea of Gorbachev was to encourage groups of farmers (includ
ing family groups) to lease some land from the parent collective which they could
farm free of central interference. This too had disappointing results partly because
district party secretaries and collective farm managers were reluctant to ‘contract-
out* any of their land, and because of apathy on the part of peasants themselves.
The most bizarre reform of this early phase was the anti-alcohol campaign,
a pet scheme of Ligachev, which involved measures to limit the production and
sale of alcohol. The Politburo had apparently not thought through the conse
quences of its policy: for one thing there was a huge increase in illicit distilling;
and as well as being unpopular, it caused a serious loss of revenue, since sales of
alcohol brought in more revenue than the state received in income tax. As one
observer wrote: ‘By giving away its revenue to the bootlegger, the government in
the last two years has sharply increased its budgetary imbalace and incurred
a deficit which is today being covered in a most dangerous and unhealthy way,
by the printing press.’3By 1987 all the signs were that the first phase of perestroika
was not having the desired impact (Document A). Reports were coming in that
the reform policies were not being carried into effect on the ground - nothing
was actually changing; initial industrial indicators showed that 1987 output was
going to be lower than 1986. Another shock for Gorbachev early in 1987 was the
revelation that 40 per cent of the entire state budget was being spent on the mili
tary and in the attempt to keep up with the USA and Reagan’s Star Wars project.
It was the military-industrial complex which was doing best out of perestroika.
This was not what had been intended, and it was clear that much more drastic
measures were needed.
(c) G la sn o st and the Chernobyl disaster

Another strand of Gorbachev’s new policies was glasnost - meaning ‘openness’
or ‘a making public'. His aim was not that the people should be told everything,
or that censorship should be completely abolished, but that there should be
a more free exchange of ideas, more debate about current issues and controver
sies. At the Party Congress in February 1986 he dismissed arguments in favour of
caution by insisting that ‘There can only be one answer to this, a Leninist answer:
under all circumstances, Communists need the truth.' The party should be able

to face up to criticism and to indulge in self-criticism. However, the policy was
slow to get under way, and the problems of secrecy were demonstrated by the
Chernobyl disaster. On 26 April 1986 a terrible accident took place at a nuclear
power station near Chernobyl in Ukraine. The core of one of the reactors over
heated and the staff, poorly supervised and badly trained, simply tried to cool the
reactor instead of shutting it down immediately. There was a huge explosion
which released massive radiation; radioactive particles were blown by the wind
across Belorussia, Poland and into Scandinavia. Increased radioactivity levels
were even reported in western Europe. The leadership in Moscow did not realize
how serious the situation was, because the authorities at the power station and
in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, tried to play down the scale of the disaster. It was
newspapers in Scandinavia which first revealed that there must have been a
nuclear disaster somewhere in the USSR. The news flashed round the rest of the
world before Moscow acknowledged that anything untoward had happened.
But in fact Gorbachev himself had difficulty getting full information, and he
eventually sent an investigation team to find out exactly what had gone wrong.
The investigation into the Chernobyl disaster revealed a sorry tale of careless
ness, incompetence and ignorance. Two dozen men were killed almost immedi
ately as they tried to seal off the reactor and prevent a meltdown of its core. The
authorities at the power station and the neighouring town of Pripyat were very
slow to take action; it was 36 hours before it was decided to evacuate about
50,000 people who were living within a 10-kilometre radius of the blazing
reactor; and a whole week passed before a 30-kilometre area was evacuated.
During that time, children continued to play outside in radioactive dust, and
cattle grazed on contaminated grass. Life went on as normal in most Ukrainian
markets long after the authorities in Poland had banned the sale of certain
vegetables and warned children not to drink milk. It was eventually revealed in
Pravda that many of the staff at Chernobyl were unqualified, that drunkenness
was rife, and that safety was sacrificed for the sake of higher output.4 Gorbachev
himself later admitted that the whole thing had shaken him deeply, hot only
because of the human suffering and the devastation that it caused, but because
of the realization that a similar network of incompetence, secrecy, misinforma
tion and deliberate deception was operating all over the Soviet Union. Chernobyl
was a turning point in his thinking; he now knew that things could not be put
right by merely making administrative changes - reform had to be basic and fast.5
Gorbachev was full of confidence that the situation could be salvaged; he had
no intention of presiding over the dissolution of the USSR or the dismantling of
the communist political system. But, as Robert Service points out: ‘the irony was
that Gorbachev, in trying to prevent the descent of the system into general crisis,
proved instrumental in bringing forward that crisis and destroying the USSR.'6
The first important step was that from June 1986, Glavlit, the body responsible
for censoring the press, was told to be more lenient; in July Gorbachev addressed
a group of newspaper editors and told them to be more adventurous and to
shake up the bureaucracy. In December Gorbachev personally telephoned Andrei
Sakharov, who was still living in internal exile in Gorky, and invited him to return
to Moscow. This was part of Gorbachev’s campaign to get the intelligentsia and
some of the dissidents on his si<Je against the bureaucracy and the traditionalists.
i v
In January 1987 the USSR stopped jamming the BBC. The general aim was to use
the media to publicize inefficiency and corruption, to educate public opinion and
mobilize support for the government’s policies. Long-banned anti-Stalin films
were shown and novels published, and preparations were made to publish works
by the great poet Osip Mandelstam, who had died in a labour camp in 1938.
(d) The second phase of p e restro ik a

Gorbachev had reached the conclusion that he must reform the party and its
ideas before any radical progress could be made in economic reform. The opposi
tion was gathering itself together, even within the Politburo, where the conser
vative Ligachev was doing his best to undermine Gorbachev. It was at a Central
Committee plenum meeting in January 1987 that Gorbachev gave a clear warning
of what could be expected. He attacked Stalin, and although he did not mention
Brezhnev by name, he said that the policy of leaving officials undisturbed in
posts for so long had been absurd. Democratization was to be the new policy
objective: instead of members of local Soviets being appointed by the local party,
they were to be elected by the people, and there was to be a choice of candidates
(though not of parties). There were to be elections for important party positions,
such as committee secretaries, and elections in factories for the workforce to
choose their own director. The following November Gorbachev reiterated some
of these points in a speech to communist leaders assembled to celebrate the 70th
anniversary of the October revolution (Document B). During 1988 dramatic
changes were introduced in central government. The old Supreme Soviet of
about 1450 members only met for a few weeks each year; it was now replaced by
the Congress of People's Deputies of 2250 members, whose main function was to
elect a new and much smaller Supreme Soviet of 450 representatives; this was to
be a proper working parliament, sitting for eight months a year. The Congress
consisted of three chambers of 750 members each; members of two of the cham
bers were chosen by secret ballot in competitive constituency general elections;
the third chamber consisted of representatives of various groups which each had
a guaranteed number of seats: the communist party, the trade unions and the
co-operative movement had 100 reserved seats each, while the Komsomol, the
women’s councils, the scientific unions and others had 75 seats each.
The first elections under the new system were held in March 1989; in the Con
gress as a whole 87 per cent of those elected were communist party members.
Well-known figures elected included Roy Medvedev, Andrei Sakharov and Boris
Yeltsin. About 20 per cent of the party officials who stood in the elections were
defeated. Gorbachev claimed that the results were a victory for perestroika and
a defeat for conservatism. He pointed out that even though many communists
had lost, people had not voted against them because they were communists, but
because they were perceived to be bureaucrats and conservatives. A great deal of
public interest and even enthusiasm had been generated by the elections, the
first semi-free ones for some 70 years. But there were ominous signs for the
future of communism, especially when, during its second session, in December
1989, the Congress dropped the system of reserved seats; this meant that at the
next election, due in 1994, even Gorbachev would have to stand and put himself
Gorbachev and the end of the Soviet Union 40 7

Figure 10.1 The Moscow Summit, May 1988. Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, greet
Reagan and his wife, Nancy, in the Kremlin. From left to right: Mrs Gorbachev, Reagan,
Gorbachev, Mrs Reagan.
to the test of a popular vote. As Richard Sakwa puts it, ‘the election [of 1989]
marked an irreversible step in the evolution of perestroika as politics entered the
streets and popular consciousness. The various popular fronts and other radical
groups, including an increasing number of voters’ clubs and associations, repre
sented a growing challenge to the party’s comfortable hegemony. The machine
politics of bureaucratic socialism, and its attendant empty shelves, misman
agement and corruption, suffered a stinging defeat.’7 There seemed a strong
possibility that the party would split into two sections - reformers and conser
vatives; many thought this would have been a logical step, but Gorbachev was
determined on keeping the party together. The elections had important effects in
eastern Europe; the fact that Moscow was willing to allow contested elections,
in which communist candidates were defeated, encouraged first Poland and
then Hungary to hold multi-party elections, which eventually led to the collapse
of communism in the satellite states (see section 10.3).
The economic situation was not entirely forgotten; alongside all the startling
political changes, some radical economic reforms were introduced too. The
basic principle was the decentralization of state industry, giving more autonomy
to individual units. The details were included in the Law on State Enterprises
which was to come into operation at the beginning of 1988; 60 per cent of state
enterprises moved on to a system of self-management, and the rest were to go
over on 1 January 1989. Enterprises were allowed to engage in wholesale trade
with each other and set their own prices. Managers were no longer allocated
machinery and raw materials by the planners in Moscow, but had to negotiate
for themselves. Compulsory targets were no longer imposed from above; once
»
the state had taken its requirements, factories were free to sell the remainder of
their products on the open market and make a profit. They were even allowed to
deal with foreign firms. A new breed of managers began to develop - some were
allowed to train at business schools in the West, others at a new Institute of
Management set up in Moscow. Small-scale private enterprises were allowed,
ranging from opening restaurants, making clothes and handicrafts, and provid
ing services such as television and motor repairs, painting and decorating, and
private tuition. At first businesses were limited to members of the same family,
but this was later relaxed, and workers’ co-operatives were allowed up to a max
imum of 50 workers. One motive for this reform was to provide competition for
the slow and inefficient services provided by the state, in the hope of stimulating
a rapid improvement. Another was to provide alternative employment in case
factories, in the drive for greater efficiency, began to lay off some of their workers.
November 1989 saw the introduction of a new law to encourage more leasing in
agriculture and other spheres. Workers were allowed to buy out the enterprise
which they had leased from the state, though at this point it did not apply to land.
However, this was a big step forward towards the creation of a ‘commodity market
economy’ which the leadership had been talking about for some time.8
10.2 Foreign affairs - the end of the Cold W ar

(a) Gorbachev and Reagan
When Gorbachev became leader, US President Reagan was just beginning his
second term, and relations between East and West were still strained. Reagan
had rejected proposals for arms limitation talks and was pressing ahead with his
Star Wars project, forcing the USSR once again to try and match the USA’s per
formance. As Gorbachev became increasingly aware of the seriousness of the
Soviet economic crisis, he reached the conclusion that there must be drastic
cut-backs in military expenditure; otherwise the USSR would never be able to raise
the living standards of its citizens to the levels enjoyed in western Europe. There
was only one practical solution - the arms race must be brought to an end. If the
Americans insisted on continuing their hard line, then it was up to the Soviets to
make the first moves. In the words of Gerald Segal, ‘the early initiatives clearly
came from the Soviet side, with bold ideas from Gorbachev about INF [Inter
mediate Nuclear Forces] negotiations and even strategic weapons cuts. It was not
so much that the Soviet Union was forced to the bargaining table by the firmness
of President Reagan, but more that there was finally a Soviet leader wise enough
to take the United States up on an INF deal (zero-zero) that was partly proposed
in the expectation that it would never be taken up.'9
Gorbachev and Reagan first met in Geneva in November 1985; the two men
took to each other, but nothing of importance was agreed. The next meeting,
suggested by Gorbachev in order to discuss nuclear disarmament, took place in
Reykjavik (Iceland) in October 1986. Reagan and his team went to the summit
thinking that Gorbachev wanted to discuss fairly modest reductions in numbers
of US missiles in Europe and Soviet SS-20s. They were stunned when the Soviets

produced a sweeping set of proposals which included 50 per cent reductions in
strategic offensive forces, the complete removal of all INF from Europe, and
restrictions on strategic defences, including Reagan's Star Wars. The most breath
taking of all was the proposal for all nuclear weapons to be destroyed within ten
years. Gorbachev was extremely persuasive, and it seemed that Reagan was on
the point of signing a preliminary agreement when his aides convinced him it
was best not to be in too much of a hurry. The stumbling block was Gorbachev's
insistence on crippling limits on Reagan's Star Wars programme; Reagan refused
to accept this and the summit ended in some disarray.
At first the failure to reach agreement at Reykjavik seemed likely to sour rela
tions between the two states. But Gorbachev would not give up so easily; after the
Chernobyl accident he felt very strongly about the need for nuclear disarmament;
‘if the peaceful atom is attended by such risk,’ he said, ‘what does that say about
the nuclear weapon?' In another speech he said: ‘Our ideal is a world without
weapons and violence.' Later he claimed that the fundamental principle of his
thinking was that ‘nuclear weapons cannot be a means of achieving political,
economic, ideological or any other goals... Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the
continuation of policy only by different means, which was classical in his time,
has grown hopelessly out of date.’10 Other developments helped to keep the
atmosphere reasonably friendly; Sakharov’s return to Moscow in December 1986,
Gorbachev’s continued attacks on Stalin and Brezhnev, and the signs that the
USSR wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan (see next section). Another summit
meeting took place in Washington in December 1987, and this time an important
agreement was reached. Gorbachev made a concession to Reagan by not insisting
that constraints must be placed on the American Star Wars project; Gorbachev
had been impressed by the arguments of his own scientific experts who pointed
out that the programme was still only in the early stages of research; the time
when it would become reality was so far in the future that it was not worth making
a fuss about at this stage. Consequently the two leaders were able to sign the
Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated intermediate and shorter-
range missiles (300 to 3000 miles) from Europe - both the American Pershing and
Cruise missiles and the Soviet SS-20s based in East Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Strict verification provisions were introduced so that both sides could check that
the weapons were actually being destroyed. Although it was Gorbachev who was
making the biggest concessions - the USSR had undertaken to destroy about four
times as many warheads as the Americans - ironically it was Reagan who was
attacked by his own right-wingers who refused to accept that Gorbachev was
‘a new kind of Soviet leader’, and who described the INF treaty as ‘treasonous.’11
In practice, the treaty meant that only four per cent of the existing stocks of
nuclear weapons were to be eliminated; but it was an important turning-point in
the nuclear arms race, since it was the first time any weapons had been destroyed.
In April 1988 agreements were signed in Geneva ending the war in Afghanistan.
Further summits took place in Moscow in May 1988 and in New York in December
1988, the day before Gorbachev addressed the United Nations General Assembly.
Once again he reiterated the Soviet Union’s commitment to world peace, and
stressed that this had now taken precedence over the class struggle. To prove
that he meant what he said, hç announced that the USSR intended to reduce its

conventional forces by half a million men - ten per cent of the Soviet army. Six
divisions, consisting of 10,000 men, were to be withdrawn from eastern Europe;
during 1989 these proposals were carried into effect. In the summer of 1988, at
the time of Reagan's visit to Moscow, Gorbachev was probably at the height of
his popularity, both at home and abroad, and more than anything else, it was
his successful foreign policy which was responsible. When Reagan was asked in
Moscow whether he still thought the Soviet Union was an ‘evil empire', he replied:
‘No, I was talking about another time, another era.’ In 1989, when the states of
eastern Europe one by one rejected communism, the USSR did nothing to pre
vent it; there was to be no repeat of the earlier Soviet interventions in Hungary
and Czechoslovakia. Gorbachev's good relationship continued with the next US
President, George Bush. In May and June 1990 Gorbachev was in the USA for
a summit with Bush; in August, when Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, the USSR and
the USA issued a joint statement condemning the invasion. Clearly the Cold War
was over. But by this time Gorbachev was in severe difficulties; the situation was
running out of his control, and he was under attack horn the traditionalists
who were horrified at the turn of events, and from the more radical reformers
who thought that things were not moving fast enough.
(b) Afghanistan and China

When he became leader, Gorbachev had already realized that Soviet intervention
in Afghanistan had been a serious mistake. It was an extremely expensive oper
ation, and the quick victory which had been anticipated did not materialize. The
Afghan army more or less disintegrated and the Soviet troops were left on their
own to prop up the Afghan government. Although there were over 100,000 Soviet
troops there at the peak of Soviet involvement, it proved impossible to defeat
their opponents - the Mujahadin - who were divided among themselves, but
were receiving aid from the USA and China. Continued Soviet involvement was
a constant source of tension between East and West, and the USSR was under
continuous pressure from the United Nations to withdraw. Gorbachev was
determined to extricate the USSR and as early as October 1985 he had secured
the Politburo’s approval. But the problem was how to achieve it; the main
concern of his military leaders was how to effect a withdrawal without it looking
like a defeat. And there was the problem of what was to happen to the head of
the Afghan government, Mohammad Najibullah. Was he to be left in place?
Could he survive? Should he be replaced by a coalition of all the opposition
groups? The military did all it could to prolong discussions and delay the inevit
able, but in the end Gorbachev had the final say. Talks began, sponsored by the
United Nations, and an agreement was signed in Geneva in April 1988: the USSR
was to withdraw all its troops over a nine-month period, both super-powers were
to stop supplying arms to the combatants and were to cease all interference in
Afghan affairs; Afghanistan and Pakistan (to which about five million refugees
had fled) agreed not to interfere in each other's affairs. A UN mission was to
check that the terms of the agreement were being carried out; many people were
sceptical that the USSR would really honour its promises. But they need not have
worried: the Soviet troop withdrawal began in May 1988 and was completed on

schedule in February 1989. Najibullah's regime survived until 1992; in 1996 he
was murdered by the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic party. The USSR also
co-operated with the United Nations in ending its interventionist role in several
other countries - including Angola, Namibia, Cambodia and Nicaragua;
Gorbachev's new thinking led him to decide that peace and stability were more
desirable than long drawn-out military struggles to establish more socialist states.
Gorbachev and his Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, generally put
themselves out to improve relations with other states. They were especially
anxious to be on better terms with the People's Republic of China; the Soviet
withdrawal from Afghanistan removed one obstacle to good relations, and the
Chinese were pleased when Gorbachev ordered the removal of 200,000 Soviet
troops from Mongolia and Central Asia, along the frontier with China. Relations
improved sufficiently for Gorbachev to be invited to visit China, which he did in
May 1989. The timing was not good though, since he arrived as protesters were
occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing, demanding political reform and democ
racy. However, the talks were successful - the USSR and China were officially
reconciled, and Gorbachev called for the complete demilitarization of the
border, where clashes in 1969 had almost led to war. On 4 June 1989, after
Gorbachev’s departure, the Chinese army crushed the democracy movement,
killing between 1500 and 3000 protesters. Although Gorbachev did not approve
of the use of force, the new friendship between the two states continued to
flourish, and cross-border trade between them increased. He tried to woo the
countries of western Europe by talking of ‘the common European home;’ he
developed a good relationship with British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher,
and with Felipe Gonzalez, the Prime Minister of Spain. On a visit to Vladivostock
he tried to foster better relations with Japan by talking about the Pacific as ‘our
common home.’ As Robert Service puts it: ‘if he had gone to the North Pole, he
would no doubt have charmed the polar bears with his commitment to “the com
mon Arctic home”.’12 Everywhere he went abroad Gorbachev received a raptur
ous welcome; in December 1989 he had an audience with Pope John fcaul II; in
October 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
10.3 The end of communism in eastern Europe

(a) Gorbachev’s attitude to eastern Europe
It seemed at first as though Gorbachev was so pre-occupied with Soviet domestic
and foreign affairs that he had little time to spare for eastern Europe. As soon as
he came to power he made it clear to the leaders of the satellite states that the
USSR would no longer interfere in their internal affairs. Of course, he wanted
communist leaders in power in the Warsaw Pact countries who shared his way of
thinking, and he certainly was not thinking in terms of the overthrow of the
communist regimes. As late as October 1987 he chastized Todor Zhivkov, the
Bulgarian leader, for policies which he thought threatened the communist party's
control, and he warned him that there were people around him of ‘a pro-Westem
orientation.’13 Yet at the same time he continued to talk about ‘the freedom to
t V
choose/ So what were Gorbachev’s intentions for eastern Europe? One theory is
that he expected the east European communists to be so impressed with his
Soviet model of reformed communism that they would voluntarily imitate it;
intervention by force would not be necessary. As the Cold War drew to an end,
Gorbachev’s ideas gradually changed; the new closer relationship between the
USSR and the West meant that they no longer viewed each other as enemies, and
consequently Soviet control over eastern Europe was no longer so vital Provided
that there could be a new type of genuinely co-operative relationship between
the Soviet Union and the independent states of eastern Europe, it scarcely
mattered whether their governments were communist or not. As Archie Brown
explains: ‘The anti-militarist element in the new thinking, together with accept
ance of the right of sovereign states to choose their own form of government,
prevailed mainly because they were values which Gorbachev had come to hold
and take seriously... a Soviet military intervention in Eastern Europe would have
involved such a discrepancy between word and deed as to destroy the credibility
which Gorbachev had built up in the outside world.’Although the changes which
occurred in 1989-90 in eastern Europe obviously went further and faster than
Gorbachev and his team had ever bargained for, Brown feels that he deserves
great credit for ‘the change he introduced in the fundamentals of Soviet foreign
policy which made possible the transformation of the East European political
landscape.’14 Robert Service, on the other hand, sees Gorbachev’s handling of
eastern Europe as rather confusing - certainly for the communist leaders. ‘He
contented himself with destabilizing the political compounds and standing
back to observe the consequences. This was like a trainee chemist running amok
in a laboratory. He was dealing with ingredients which, once tampered with,
became volatile and unpredictable.'15The leaders of eastern Europe felt betrayed;
they had known officially since they were told in Moscow in November 1986
that there would be no Soviet military interventions, whatever happened. This
information was naturally kept from their citizens for as long as possible, since
everybody knew that the communist regimes were only kept in power by the
threat of Soviet tanks rolling through their capital cities.
(b) The collapse

To say that the events of 1989-90 in eastern Europe were dramatic is an under
statement. In January 1989 every state east of the River Elbe had a communist
government; at the end of 1990 there was only one fully communist, one-party
state left in Europe, apart from the USSR itself, and that was Albania; ironically,
Albania had been hostile to the USSR ever since Khrushchev had fallen out with
China. Why did the political scene change so rapidly? The basic underlying cause
was that the communist governments had failed economically; their systems
were inefficient, over-centralized and subject to too many restrictions. By the
mid-1980s there were problems everywhere; living and working conditions for
ordinary people were far below the standard of those in western Europe; the
communist record on health, education, housing and social services generally
was poor. At the same time, increasing contact with the West showed people how
backward their own countries were in comparison and suggested that their living

Standards were falling even further, tíow long these regimes might have survived
is impossible to say; but the vital change which decided the timing of their
collapse ,was Gorbachev's decision not to intervene. They only existed because
the USSR had put them there by force or by the threat of force, and now the prop
which sustained them had been removed.
The collapse began in Poland where General Jaruzelski had been leader since
1981. All his attempts to improve the economy had failed; in 1988 he tried to eco
nomize by cutting government subsidies, but this drove prices up, and workers
responded by coming out on strike. When this had happened in the early 1980s
Jaruzelski had used the army to restore order and suppress Solidarity, the trade
union movement. But now he decided not to risk using force, since there would
be no backing from Moscow; he admitted that he needed the support of the
opposition to deal with the economic crisis. Talks began in February 1989
between the communist government, Solidarity and other opposition groups,
including the Roman Catholic Church. By April they had produced a new con
stitution: Solidarity was allowed to become a political party and elections were to
be held for a two-chamber parliament. In the lower house the communists were
guaranteed 65 per cent of the seats, but the upper house (the Senate) was freely
elected. Parliament would elect a President, who would then choose a Prime
Minister. In the elections held in June 1989 Solidarity won 92 of the 100 seats in
the Senate, and 160 out of the seats which they were allowed to contest in the
lower house. A compromise deal was worked out when it came to forming a
government: Jaruzelski was narrowly elected President, thanks to the guaranteed
communist seats in the lower house, but he chose a Solidarity supporter, Tadeusz
Mazowiecki, as Prime Minister. After the collapse of communism in the other east
European states, further changes were made in Poland. The guaranteed^ cpm-
munist seats were removed, and in December 1990, Lech Walesa, the Solidarity
leader, was elected President. The peaceful revolution in Poland was complete.
The Hungarian Communist party had already changed its leadership in May
1988, replacing Kadar with the more radical Karoly Grosz. However, progress was
not quick enough for most people; two large opposition parties were formed, the
liberal Alliance of Free Democrats, and the Democratic Forum, which represented
the interests of farmers. Following the example of the Poles, the Hungarian com
munists decided to go peacefully. Free elections were held in March 1990; the
communists changed their name to the Hungarian Socialist Party, but they still
suffered a crushing defeat. The election was won by the Democratic Forum,
whose leader, Jozsef Antall, became Prime Minister. The changes in Hungary had
spectacular consequences for the German Democratic Republic (GDR) - East
Germany. In September 1989, while the communists were still in power in
Hungary, Karoly Grosz's government opened Hungary's frontiers with Austria,
and allowed thousands of East Germans to pass through Hungary into Austria;
from there they could make their way into West Germany. On 6 October
Gorbachev visited Berlin for the celebrations marking the fortieth anniversary of
the birth of the GDR. Erich Honecker, the East German leader, had been in power
since 1971 and had consistently refused all reforms. He organized a grandiose
state ceremony with many speeches, a military parade and fireworks. In private
Gorbachev hinted broadly that thé leadership would soon have to introduce
4 14 Mastering Twentieth-Century ûçsian History

some massive changes or end up in defeat; reportedly at one point he made
a remark which became famous: ‘Life itself punishes those who delay.’16 Soon
after Gorbachev's departure, opposition quickly gathered momentum in East
Germany and there was a wave of demonstrations all over the country demand
ing freedom and an end to communist rule. Some sources claim that Honecker
wanted to use the army to crush the demonstrators, as the Chinese had done in
Tiananmen Square in June 1989, although he knew that there would be no back
ing for this from Gorbachev. There was a huge demonstration in Leipzig on
9 October; special forces had been placed on alert and there were vast numbers
of police, and ambulance and hospital services at the ready. Apparently, blood
shed was only averted at the last moment by ‘a combination of civic spirit, luck,
and the failure of the party chain of command.'17 The conductor of the Leipzig
Gewandhaus Orchestra, Kurt Masur, played an important part in calming down
the crowds and preventing violence. Honecker's days as leader were numbered;
some of his colleagues were plotting to get rid of him, and on 18 October they
forced him to resign. He was replaced by Egon Krenz, who immediately offered
concessions. On 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall was opened; thousands of
people flocked out to help break down the wall, demolishing sections of it by
hand, and later bringing up heavy equipment. Still the momentum continued; at
a crisis meeting early in December, the communist party abdicated its leading
role and forced Krenz to resign. Elections were fixed for March 1990.
Although the communist domination of East Germany was now over, very few
people were talking publicly about the reunification of Germany. But the economy
of the GDR was in serious difficulties; a report published at the end of October
showed that productivity was at least 40 per cent below that of West Germany,
and that the GDR was on the verge of financial collapse. Krenz appealed to the
USSR for aid, but Gorbachev pointed out that the Soviet Union too was in deep
economic trouble, and suggested that the GDR should ‘foster and constantly
strengthen' relations with West Germany; in other words, go begging to Bonn to
help them prop up the GDR. Although this advice must have given rise to
thoughts of German unification, Gorbachev told Krenz early in November that
this was not on the international agenda. Yet there is also evidence that on his
earlier visit to Bonn in June 1989, Gorbachev had promised West German
Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, that he would help German unification in return for
German economic aid for the USSR. Soon after the Berlin Wall came down, Kohl,
without consulting anybody, even his own Foreign Minister, published a ten-point
programme for reunification. Hans Modrow, the new East German Prime Minis
ter, visited Moscow on 30 January 1990 and told Gorbachev that the majority of
East Germans no longer wanted a separate state; it was going to be impossible to
preserve the republic. Gorbachev seemed to take this news calmly, and in February
he told Kohl that it was up to the Germans to decide things for themselves. In the
run-up to the East German elections in March 1990, Kohl staged an election tour
in support of the Alliance for Germany, the main opposition party to the commun
ists. The Alliance won an overwhelming victory and in April the new government
called for the unification of the two German states.
The USA gave its approval, but there were one or two sticking points before the
USSR agreed. Kohl wanted the new Germany to be a member of NATO, but at

first this was unacceptable to Gorbachev. He was eventually persuaded to con
cede this point by US President Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker,
although in his memoirs he claims that the idea to allow the Germans to decide
their own security arrangements originated with him and not with Bush. One of
the reasons why Gorbachev accepted German membership of NATO was that,
after a shaky start, he had developed an excellent relationship with Chancellor
Kohl, so that Germany no longer seemed to be a threat to the USSR. Gorbachev's
handling of the situation caused some consternation among his colleagues, since
he acted very much on his own. Without informing Shevardnadze, who had
done all the spade work on Soviet-German relations, Gorbachev abandoned all
claims as an occupying power and any restrictions on German sovereignty,
including the future right to be a member of NATO. Shevardnadze knew that the
ire of the military and the conservatives at the “loss” of the GDR would descend
on his head. Gorbachev also failed to discuss German unification in the Polit
buro.’18 Nevertheless, the decision had been taken: Germany was officially
reunited on 3 October 1990.
Meanwhile, events had not been standing still in the rest of eastern Europe.
A week after the Berlin Wall came down, Czechoslovakia began what became
known as the ‘Velvet Revolution’. The first big anti-communist demonstration
was held in Prague on 17 November 1989. At first it seemed as though the com
munists would try to hold on, and some people were injured when police went
into action to disperse the crowds. The Civil Rights movement, Charter 77, led by
the famous playwright, Vaclav Havel, organized further opposition rallies. After
Alexander Dubcek, the hero of the 1968 Prague Spring, had made an emotional
speech - his first public appearance since his removal by Soviet troops over
20 years earlier - a national strike was declared. The communists decided it was
time to go, and on 29 December 1989 Havel was elected President In Romania
the brutal and repressive regime of Nicolae Ceausescu was also overthrown in
December. As unrest mounted across the country, Ceausescu ordered his troops
to fire on the crowds of protestors, and many were killed and wouhded. This
caused outrage, and when Ceausescu and his wife appeared on the balcony of
Communist Party Headquarters in Bucharest to address a massed rally, they
were greeted with booing, groaning and whistling. He tried to continue his
speech, but soon faltered and stopped. The scene was being televised, and at this
point the transmission abruptly ceased; nothing like it had ever happened before,
but now the whole country could see that at last the hated Ceausescu was being
challenged. It seemed as though the entire population of Bucharest streamed out
onto the streets. Ceausescu ordered his security forces to shoot to kill. For a time
it seemed that order might be restored, but the following day even more people
joined in; it was turning into a full-scale rebellion. The turning-point came when
the regular army refused to fire on the crowds; the Ceausescus had lost control.
They were eventually arrested, tried by an impromptu military tribunal and shot
(25 December 1989).
Changes also took place in Bulgaria, although here they were not so clear-cut.
In December 1989 the progressive communists in the Bulgarian Politburo voted
Todor Zhivkov, who had been leader since 1954, out of office. Free elections were
held in June 1990 which were won by the communists, now calling themselves

the Bulgarian Socialist Party. Change was a little longer coming in Albania but
eventually the communist leadership bowed to the inevitable and allowed free
elections; the first non-communist president was elected in 1992. By this time
the Soviet Union itself had disintegrated and Gorbachev was out of office.
By the end of 1990 the USSR had not only lost control over the states of eastern
Europe, it had also failed to retain much influence in the area. This, according to
Archie Brown, was ‘a giant failure of Soviet foreign policy over more than forty
years,’ but not a failure on the part of Gorbachev, although the Soviet military
leaders and communist hardliners interpreted it as such, and talked of the ‘loss’
of eastern Europe. But, asks Brown, ‘who actually lost?' He goes on to argue
that the only people who actually lost were ‘those forces with an interest in con
frontation - ideological, political and military - and who wished to preserve
authoritarian regimes.’ But everybody else gained: the West gained because it
was no longer faced by a hostile Warsaw Pact; the countries of eastern Europe
gained because they were now independent; and Russia also gained because it
was saved from massive military expenditure and was no longer responsible, and
held accountable, for everything which happened in eastern Europe.19Gorbachev
surely deserves enormous credit for refusing to use force to preserve the com
munist regimes of eastern Europe, even though he must have known that their
collapse would make it all the more difficult for him to preserve his own regime
in the USSR.
10.4 Gorbachev runs into problems

(a) Opposition from radicals and conservatives
After two years in power, as he moved into the second stage of perestroika,
Gorbachev was encountering opposition from many quarters. The traditionalists
or conservatives, including Ligachev, a man Gorbachev thought was his ally,
were alarmed that the changes were much too drastic and that the party was in
danger of losing control. The radicals, who included Boris Yeltsin, were impatient
and wanted a faster pace of reform. Yeltsin, who was first secretary of the
Moscow party, was a controversial politician who had made himself popular
with the citizens of Moscow by sacking many corrupt officials, including the
mayor. Naturally the bureaucracy, fearful of losing their jobs, detested him.
At Politburo meetings he constantly clashed with Ligachev, and although
Gorbachev had some sympathy with Yeltsin’s views, he could not afford to side
with Yeltsin against Ligachev, who controlled the party apparatus. Matters came
to a head at a Central Committee plenum on 21 October 1987. Gorbachev made
perhaps his most radical statement so far, criticizing his conservative opponents,
many of whom were in the audience. ‘We must learn to identify, expose and neu
tralise the overt opponents of perestroika,’ he said, ‘those who are holding things
up, sticking spokes in the wheels and gloating over the difficulties and failures,
those who are trying to push us back into the worst years of the past.’ Then
Yeltsin spoke: he complained about ‘what I can only call the increasing adulation
of the general secretary... I regard this as intolerable.’ He said that the people of

the USSR had gained nothing during the past two years, and told the audience
that he was handing in his resignation from the Politburo because of lack of
support, ‘especially from Comrade Ligachev.’ As he went to sit down, there was
pandemonium in the hall, and a whole string of speakers rushed to defend
Ligachev and condemn Yeltsin.'The speech was ill-judged and tactless and could
hardly fail to embarrass Gorbachev, whose own policies came under attack too;
to some extent Gorbachev was forced to retreat from his radical position, which
was now discredited, thanks to Yeltsin, and to take up a more central stance, at
least for the time being. As Angus Roxburgh points out, ‘eventually Gorbachev
would persuade the party to reorganize the Secretariat and apparat, and give up
its privileges, just as Yeltsin had demanded. It might have happened sooner,
however, had not Yeltsin provoked the conservatives with his behaviour at the
October plenum.'20
The conservatives now decided to launch an attack on Yeltsin; on 11 November
1987, even though he was ilfln hospital with severe headaches and chest pains,
Gorbachev summoned him to attend a meeting of the Moscow party organization.
Against his doctors' orders and heavily sedated, he was taken first to a Politburo
meeting and then to the Moscow party session. In a state of semi-collapse, he
was forced to listen to a series of fierce attacks from party officials whom he had
sacked or annoyed. He was dismissed as Moscow first secretary and his resigna
tion as a Politburo candidate member was accepted. Ligachev and the conserva
tives were triumphant; this was the bureaucracy taking its revenge on the man
who had tried to clean them up. After they had all left, it was Gorbachev who
went over to Yeltsin, who was still sitting slumped at the table. Taking him sym
pathetically by the arm, Gorbachev helped him out of the hall, and an ambulance
took him back to hospital. Most people thought this was the end of Yeltsin’s
political career, and for the time being the radical reformers were discredited.
Gorbachev and his friend Yakovlev were almost the only reformers left among
the leading elite.
Yegor Ligachev was a genuine Marxist, committed to the party’s mission, and
he agreed with Gorbachev that it was vital to stamp out the corruption, the
inefficiency and the indiscipline of the Brezhnev period. He believed it was the
party's duty to make the system work, and he disapproved of Gorbachev’s talk
of the market economy, private enterprise and democratization, because he
believed that this would destroy the party’s control. When Gorbachev told him
that his privatization plans would only involve seven per cent of the total,
Ligachev replied: ‘That is an illusion. I tasted private property in my childhood
[he meant NEP during the 1920s] and I know: they will not be content with
seven per cent. Big business and private capital will hog everything.' Perestroika
was leading to the re-emergence of nationality problems too: in February 1988
trouble broke out in the Caucasus. Encouraged by Gorbachev’s calls for a crit
ical look at Soviet history, the council of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region where
about 80 per cent of the population was Armenian, voted to take itself out of
the republic of Azerbaijan, where Stalin had placed it in 1923, and into the
republic of Armenia. Violent clashes broke out between Armenians and Azeris,
and the dispute threatened to develop into civil war between the two republics
(see section 10.5(a)). The conservatives blamed it all on perestroika and in

March 1988 Ligachev and his supporters attacked again. When Gorbachev was
about to leave on a visit to Yugoslavia and Yakovlev was in Mongolia, a letter
appeared in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya from Nina Andreyeva, a Lenin
grad teacher, defending Stalin and his achievements and condemning recent
‘left-wing liberal’ developments as alarming and excessive; there were also
jibes at Jews, who, it was suggested, were not genuine Russians (Document C).
It was, says Martin McCauley, ‘a full frontal assault on perestroika and it caused
the blood of the reformers to run cold.’21 When Gorbachev returned, he
ordered a full enquiry; it emerged that this was no ordinary letter. It had been
received some time before, and had been rewritten by Ligachev supporters.
Ligachev denied any involvement in the affair but Gorbachev was not entirely
convinced. Another conservative attempt to derail his policies had failed, and
he tried to make sure that there was no repetition. Ligachev lost his responsi
bility for the party apparatus and ideology; and it was at the party conference in
June 1988 that Gorbachev introduced his plans for the Congress of People’s
Deputies. This was the beginning of Gorbachev's attempt to transfer the basis
of authority within the country from the party to the state. In the existing
system, the communist party and the state had fused into the same body. He
hoped gradually to shift his power base from the party to the new Congress,
elected by the people.
Following the elections for the Congress in March 1989 (see section 10.1(d))
the reformers staged a come-back. The first session, which lasted from 25 May to
9 June, was rumbustious and chaotic, and Gorbachev, who was elected Chair
man of the Supreme Soviet, had a difficult job keeping the debates under controL
Although the radical deputies were in a minority - no more than about 300 out of
2250 - they were very successful in making themselves heard. The proceedings
were televised live, and, in the words of David Remnick, ‘no one in the country
could tear himself away from these televised sessions. No newspaper, no film,
book or play had ever had such an immediate political effect on the people of the
Soviet Union... factories and collective farms reported that no work was getting
done. People simply could not believe what they were hearing... These were
days when radical democrats thought that reform of the Party was not only pos
sible, but the only route to change. They were overcome with a sense of triumph
and possibility.’22The radicals challenged everything: there were criticisms of the
KGB, the generals, the party apparatus and the privileges of the elite. Gorbachev
allowed all this; it was only during the second session of the Congress in Decem
ber 1989 when Sakharov proposed that there should be a multi-party system that
Gorbachev switched his microphone off and sent him back to his seat. Yeltsin
had been elected with a huge majority as a deputy for Moscow, but when the
Congress came to its main business of electing the members of the Supreme
Soviet, the conservative majority rejected him. After an angry rally of Yeltsin
supporters in Moscow, an unknown deputy from Siberia offered to give up his
seat in the Supreme Soviet to Yeltsin; Gorbachev went along with this; after his
earlier unsympathetic treatment of Yeltsin, he could hardly go against his own
call for ‘democratization’.
For the first time, there was a recognized opposition to the communist party,
both in the Congress, and also in the Supreme Soviet, where there was a vociferous

minority of critics, especially from the non-Russian republics - Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania Georgia and Armenia. Unfortunately for Gorbachev, things were
beginning to slip out of control. Thanks to glasnost and the extensive television
coverage, people knew that communism was being successfully challenged in
Poland and Hungary. By the end of 1989 the non-Russians, seeing communism
on the run in eastern Europe, were thinking in terms of independence from the
USSR. In November 1989 the Georgian Supreme Soviet declared sovereignty, and
the following month the communist party of Lithuania declared itself independ
ent of the communist party of the USSR (see section 10.5(a)). At the same time
the economy was in crisis; ordinary citizens were affected when consumer and
household goods such as soap, toothpaste, cups and saucers, washing-powder
and razor-blades simply disappeared from the shops. People's patience began to
run out; shortages and poor conditions led to the first serious strikes since the
1920s. In July 1989 the coal-miners of the Kuznetzk region (Kuzbass) went on
strike when they found that there was no soap to wash themselves with at the
end of their shift. ‘What kind of regime is this,' they asked, ‘when we can't even
get washed?' After staging a sit-in, they decided on ah all-out strike; in a matter
of days the strike had spread to all the main coal-mining areas including the
Donbass in Ukraine. Eventually some half a million miners were on strike, sup
ported by around 160,000 workers in other industries who came out in sympathy.
They had many grievances - the lack of soap was just the final straw; they demanded
improvements in pay and conditions, pensions, safety, pollution control and
management. There were startling political demands too - more power to the
Soviets, an independent trade union like Solidarity in Poland, and the cancella
tion of Article 6 of the constitution, which gave the communist party its dominant
role in the political system. The strikers displayed a high level of discipline and
organization, holding mass meetings, forming committees and patrols, and
working with the police to maintain order. For the first time since the Civil War
force was not used against the protesters, and no sanctions were imposed on
them after the strike ended. Gorbachev sympathized with many of theiiMemands,
and enough concessions were made to persuade them to return to work. The
strike was effectively over by the end of July. Gorbachev claimed that the strikes
were a statement of support for perestroika. In reality, the workers' movement
was another emerging independent force pushing perestroika in new directions;
since the communist party claimed to represent the interests of the working
class, it could not afford to ignore their views. In the autumn of 1989 the miners
of Vorkuta in the Komi Autonomous Republic went on strike again, with yet
more overt political demands - again, the abolition of Article 6, plus direct
elections for the presidency, and a rule preventing the head of the party from
being President as well.23
It was inevitable that sooner or later a major challenge would be mounted to
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At the second session of the Congress
of People's Deputies which began on 12 December 1989, Sakharov tried to call
for the abolition of Article 6 of the constitution. This was the occasion on which
Gorbachev switched off Sakharov’s microphone and refused to allow the pro
posal to be discussed. According ta Archie Brown, Gorbachev had accepted, in
private, at least since the summer of 1988, that Article 6 would have to go and
»'
that the party would have to give up its leading role and take its place within
a multi-party system. ‘But he wanted to do this at a time of his own choosing
when executive power could be transferred from the Communist Party to
elected state executive organs... He wanted to choose the right tim e... The
problem was, however, that when the time was as yet scarcely ripe for the
Communist Party establishment - in early 1990 - it was already overripe for
a society which had seen Communist Parties removed not only from their con
stitutionally decreed “leading role” but from actual power in Eastern Europe in
the course of 1989.’24 Nevertheless Gorbachev pushed ahead with his plans. He
prepared a new set of proposals to carry the transfer of power from party to state
a further important step; two of the main points were the introduction of a presi
dential system, and the amendment of Article 6 so that the party abandoned its
leading role, accepted a multi-party system and adopted ‘humane, democratic
socialism.’ In February 1990 the proposals were put to a Central Committee
plenum. Predictably there was a stormy debate; the conservatives did all they
could to wreck the amendments to Article 6; both conservatives and radicals
objected to the new role of president, which, they said, would carry too much
power. Vladimir Brovikov, the Soviet ambassador to Poland, put the conserva
tive case forcibly: ‘The general secretary and his closest colleagues are trying to
shove the Party onto the sidelines of political life, to turn it from a ruling party
into a discussion club, or at best into a pawn in a parliamentary game. To let this
happen would be a catastrophe for the country... our leaders are trying to cross
out the Party as the leading force in society and to transfer the functions of the
Politburo to the President.’25 However, Gorbachev got his way: the Plenum and
the Congress eventually approved the proposals, and in March Gorbachev was
elected President of the Soviet Union for a term of five years. Two new bodies
came into existence to help the President to function: a Federation Council
which consisted of the parliamentary leaders of all 15 republics, and a Presiden
tial Council, which consisted of senior ministers and any other advisers whom
the President cared to chose. He could, he hoped, now function increasingly
independently of the party.
Gorbachev was soon disappointed once again. The presidency did not give
him the power he had hoped for, partly because he had decided to opt for an
election by the Congress of People’s Deputies instead of by the whole popula
tion. His caution was understandable - there must have been considerable doubt
as to whether he could have won an election across the entire Soviet Union,
given that his popularity was dwindling rapidly, while Boris Yeltsin’s was
increasing. This meant that Gorbachev's presidency, unlike the Presidency of
the United States, somehow lacked legitimacy. Further problems were caused for
the new President by the results of the republican and regional elections held in
February and March 1990. In the three Baltic republics the elections were won by
pro-independence candidates, many of whom were communists; on 11 March
Lithuania formally declared itself independent of the USSR, the first of the
republics to do so. In elections for the parliament of the Russian Soviet Federated
Socialist Republic (RSFSR or simply Russia), the official party candidates did
badly; worst of all for Gorbachev, on 29 May Yeltsin completed his dramatic
comeback when he was elected Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet. Yeltsin

now became the focus of attention for all the radical reformers. Although he had
no power in the other 14 republics outside the RSFSR, in the political centres of
Moscow and Leningrad, where it really mattered, Yeltsin now had an enormous
advantage over Gorbachev: he was, in effect, the President of a democratically
elected parliament which would become more powerful than the communist
party. There were now two presidents, two parliaments and two governments in
one country, and even in one capital city - Moscow. On 8 June 1990 the Russian
republic announced its sovereignty, which meant, as far as anybody could be
certain, that Russian laws took precedence over Soviet ones. Yeltsin's parliament
and government would be able to prevent Gorbachev’s policies being imple
mented in Russia; or alternatively, it could implement them in a more radical
way than Gorbachev intended. Yeltsin was formally elected president of the
Russian Federation on 12 June 1991.
(b) Economic failures

Economic reform turned out to be one of Gorbachev's two major failures; the
other was his failure to cope with the problem of the non-Russian nationalities.
His economic reforms seemed to have very little overall effect; after four years
of perestroika, Soviet gross national product (GNP) was more or less static; in
1990 industrial production actually fell by 1.2 per cent and agricultural produc
tion by 2.3 per cent, according to official figures, but most experts think the
true figures were more serious.26 Gorbachev had promised that at last life really
would improve: there would be goods in plenty in the shops and everybody
would be able to afford to buy them. If he could only have delivered on the food
and consumer goods front and kept people materially happy, both he and the
Soviet system might well have survived. Instead things got worse; during the
summer of 1986 there was a cotton wool shortage; in a country which produced
completely inadequate amounts of tampons and sanitary towels for its one
hundred million women of childbearing age, this was an insult and a'tiisaster.27
In 1989 the shortages became more widespread, the queues longer and more
impatient, and food rationing was introduced. By the end of 1988, meat was
rationed in 26 out of the 55 regions of the RSFSR; sugar was even more scarce,
and was rationed in all but two of the regions. Even the hospitals were report
ing shortages of medicines.28 One of the reasons for the shortages was that no
really dramatic changes occurred either in agriculture or industry. This was
because officials in every republic and region only carried out parts of legisla
tion which could be done easily, without damaging their own interests too
much. In some areas they actively sabotaged Gorbachev’s policies; it scarcely
seems believable, but it happened, that in Leningrad the hard-line communist
authorities ordered the supply of sausages to be taken from the storage fridges
and buried in a trench outside the city. Such were the depths to which they
were prepared to sink to discredit Gorbachev. By the closing months of 1989,
basic items like tea, coffee, milk and soap were nowhere to be seen in the state
shops. Often the quality of the goods available was poor; John Simpson, the
BBC's Foreign Affairs editor, was in Moscow for a time, and experienced the
awfiilness of that most popular of Russian foods - the sausage. ‘Have you tasted
è v
the sausage?’ his friends asked him. ‘It’s filthy - quite inedible.’ He felt obliged
to taste it himself, and was forced to agree: ‘It was indeed filthy, packed out
with gristle and with some strange tasteless white filler. A thin colourless juice
leaked from it as I bit into it. Its flavour was indescribably bad. I had once
caught worms by eating Soviet sausage, but this was worse. There had been bad
sausage in the past, and shortages of food too. What was different now was that
people were freer than at any time since the 1920s to discuss the difficulties
they were experiencing and to complain about them.’29 The shortage of soap,
among other grievances, led to a serious miners' strike in the summer of 1989
which involved over half a million in the major coal-fields of the USSR (see pre
vious section).
Two aspects of the government's policies which were effective unfortunately
did not have quite the desired results. One was the increasing number of private
family businesses and co-operatives encouraged by the government. This made
the shortage situation worse. Instead of starting up small manufacturing indus
tries, as the government had hoped, most of them went into the retail and supply
business. They tended to buy up much of the available stocks of goods which
they sold at higher prices than in the state outlets. The co-operatives soon got
themselves a bad reputation; poorer people - pensioners and the lowest paid
workers - could not afford their high prices, and there was resentment at the fat
profits which many of them made. The other measure which had unforeseen
results was the Law on State Enterprises which came into effect in January 1988.
It allowed managers to fix wages depending on availability of labour and levels of
production. Output was measured by its value in roubles, which tempted man
agers not to increase overall output, but to concentrate on more expensive goods
and reduce output of cheaper goods. The general trend of wages was upwards,
whereas productivity remained static or even declined. The government printed
more money to meet its requirements; inflation rose and the budget deficit
threatened to get out of control.
The economy was adversely affected by the decline in output of oil and coal,
the latter to some extent caused by the strikes. Between 1989 and 1991 oil exports
fell by almost 50 per cent, and the fact that world oil prices fell did not help the
situation. Another blow came from the events in eastern Europe during 1989-90.
Comecon was dissolved and it was decided that trade with the former satellite
states would be conducted in hard currency rather than on an exchange of com
modity basis. Since hard currency was in short supply, this caused a catastrophic
decline in trade with eastern Europe, and a consequent shortage of equipment
and consumer goods previously imported from these countries. Nationalist
problems within the USSR, as republics began to declare themselves independ
ent, led to a fragmentation of the economy (see next section). When the USSR
Congress of People’s Deputies voted to increase social benefits, particularly pen
sions, the expense could only be met by printing more money; this accelerated
inflation still further. The State Bank had lost control of monetary growth, and by
1990 there was a current account deficit of the equivalent of roughly 15 billion
dollars.30 Ordinary people could not understand why things had suddenly
become so much worse. Not realizing that this was the culmination of 20 years of
economic stagnation, they blamed Gorbachev for everything.

10.5 The USSR disintegrates
«
(a) The republics break away
The nationalist problem was Gorbachev’s second greatest failure, and like the
economic crisis, it contributed significantly to the break-up of the Soviet Union.31
The Russian republic (RSFSR), with a population of around 145 million ethnic
Russians in 1986, was just one of fifteen republics which made up the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics. It was the largest of the republics, having about 52 per
cent of the total population of the USSR. The other 14 republics were: the three
Baltic states of Latvia (1.5 million), Estonia (1.1 million) and Lithuania (3 million);
the three other western Slavic nationalities of Ukraine (44 million), Belorussia
(10 million) and Moldavia (3 million); the three Transcaucasian republics of
Armenia (4.5 million), Azerbaijan (5.9 million) and Georgia (3.9 million); and the
Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan (16.5 million), Turkmenistan (2.7 million),
Kirgizstan (2.6 million), Tajikistan (3.9 million) and Kazakhstan (8.7 million). The
communist party elites in many of the non-Russian republics had become
entrenched in power during the Brezhnev years, and were corrupt and resistant
to change. This was especially true in Transcaucasia and Central Asia; although
Gorbachev was able to replace the leadership in some of the republics, he was
unable to do much about the local nomenklatura in the party and the government.
In December 1986 there were the first disturbing signs that Gorbachev did not
understand the strength of nationalist feelings or the delicacy of the relationship
between Moscow and some of the republics (Document D). He decided to get rid
of the 74-year old Dinmukhamad Kunayev, who had been leader of Kazakhstan
since 1954, who had a reputation for spectacular corruption and ran his republic,
with the help of his numerous family and friends, like a mafia boss. An article in
Izvestiya claimed that among his other considerable assets, he had control of 247
hotels, 414 guest flats, 84 cottages, 22 hunting lodges and 350 hospital beds.32
Certainly Kunayev deserved to go, but Gorbachev made the mistake ofêplacing
him with a Russian, Gennady Kolbin, who had just distinguished himself by
cleaning up the corruption in Georgia, and who, it was hoped, would repeat the
exercise in Kazakhstan. This was insensitive to say the least; Kazakh nationalist
feelings were outraged that a Russian should be foisted on them as their next
leader. There was a huge protest demonstration in front of communist party
headquarters in Alma Ata, the capital, although it was not entirely spontaneous -
Kunayev’s family and friends had a hand in its organization. Moscow decided
that the Kazakhs needed a sharp lesson: troops were brought in to disperse the
demonstrators, who seemed to be mostly students. Some were killed, hundreds
injured and thousands were arrested. Gorbachev was shocked by the reaction
and by the bloodshed, but he did not back down, at least not immediately; it was
only in 1989 that he replaced Kolbin with a native Kazakh.
The problem for Gorbachev was that as glasnost and perestroika came on full
stream, with freedom of expression and democratization, further tensions were
inevitable. The various nationalities began to demand greater local control and
self-determination. Nor was it just a simple case of non-Russians resisting con
trol from Moscow; in each of the republics there were conflicts between ethnic
424 Mastering Twentieth-Century Kujsian History

minorities and the dominant nationality group. In Georgia, for example, there
were two minority groups - the Abkhaz who were Muslims, and the Osetins -
who each had small autonomous regions of their own within Georgia. There
were constant clashes between the Abkhaz and Osetins on the one hand, who
protested that the Georgians were trying to interfere excessively in their regions,
and the Georgians on the other hand, who complained that the non-Georgians
were expecting too much. The most disturbing development was the emergence
of a Russian nationalist movement under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin which
aimed to use the Russian republic as an alternative power base from which to
challenge the hard-line communists and Gorbachev as well. So although
Gorbachev had no intention of causing the break-up of the USSR, it seems that
this outcome was almost inevitable if he continued with the democratizing
element of perestroika. However, Gorbachev believed that it ought to be possible
to work out a middle way between the existing Soviet system and a total break
down, in which every national group, not just the fifteen republics, became
completely independent. He hoped, by persuasion and negotiation, to arrive at
a system which still preserved a high level of integration and co-operation.
The first major nationalist test for Gorbachev was a conflict between the
republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan over possession of the Nagorno-Karabakh
region. The population of this area was 80 per cent Armenian but it had been
placed under the jurisdiction of Azerbaijan by Stalin in 1923. Armenian resent
ment had smouldered on and off since then. They had many grievances: they
were Christians, whereas the Azeris were mainly Shiite Muslims; they felt that
their culture was suppressed and that they were exploited economically by the
Azeri authorities in Baku. The new atmosphere in the USSR encouraged the
Soviet of Nagorno-Karabakh to request a transfer to the jurisdiction of Armenia
(February 1988). Demonstrations were held in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, in
support of this demand, and clashes developed between Azeris and Armenians
in other parts of Azerbaijan. The worst violence occurred in the city of Sumgait
on the Caspian Sea near Baku: 26 Armenians and 6 Azeris were killed. Moscow's
official line was that the request could not be granted, since it would encourage
scores of similar demands and clashes; however, Gorbachev did promise a just
solution. In June 1988 the Armenian Supreme Soviet voted to incorporate
Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia, but this was rejected by the Supreme Soviet of
Azerbaijan. The Supreme Soviet of the USSR voted against the incorporation into
Armenia. As disorders continued, the Supreme Soviet decided to place Nagorno-
Karabakh under direct rule from Moscow (January 1989). This did nothing to
solve the problem; ominous border clashes occurred, and the two republics were
on the brink of civil war.
In April 1989 a new crisis suddenly erupted in Georgia, where there was a rap
idly growing nationalist movement. Its aims were to press for autonomy from the
USSR, but at the same time to deny the Abkhaz people their independence from
Georgia. Huge demonstrations were organized, stretching over several days, in
the capital, Tbilisi, and although they were almost entirely peaceful, the local
communist party leaders decided to use troops to disperse the crowds. Twenty of
the demonstrators were killed, including several policemen who tried to protect
women in the crowd from assault by the troops, and hundreds were injured;

but the violence was counter-productive: public opinion in Georgia was outraged
and quickly turned against the Georgian Communist Party. There was a rush of
support for the nationalists and for complete independence from the USSR.
In November the Georgian Supreme Soviet declared sovereignty and decided
that the Soviet occupation of Georgia in 1921 violated the treaty signed in 1920
between Georgia and Russia. There was great controversy about who should be
held responsible for the Tbilisi tragedy, and for a time there was a tendency to
blame Gorbachev. But in fact there is plenty of evidence that he did his best to
prevent violence. He stated categorically that the situation must be resolved by
political means and through dialogue* A commission of enquiry later put the
blame on the local party leadership, who were sacked, and on the general in charge
of the troops, who was moved elsewhere.33
The three Baltic republics had been incorporated into the USSR in 1940 under
the terms of the secret agreement between Germany and the USSR, shortly after
the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939. Moscow insisted that they
had joined voluntarily and denied any secret agreement. They were occupied by
the Germans in 1941 and retaken by Soviet forces in 1944. Nationalist resistance
movements waged guerrilla warfare against the occupying forces, and Stalin
dealt with them ruthlessly: there were hundreds of executions, and in total, from
the three states, some 700,000 people were deported to Siberia. Local cultures were
undermined and suppressed; another source of grievance, especially in Latvia
and Estonia, was the arrival of large numbers of Russian immigrants attracted by
the growing industrialization. By 1989 only half the population of Latvia were
native Latvians, while 33 per cent were Russian; in Estonia 28 per cent were
Russian. In January 1988 the Estonian People’s Front announced theirpro-
gramme. It included the restoration of Estonian instead of Russian as the official
first language, the appointment of Estonians to the leading positions in the state,
and the replacement of the command economy by a market economy. Independ
ence was not an immediate aim, but clearly that would be the ultimate objective.
The Front did not call itself a political party, since the communist pariy was the
only one allowed; in fact many communists were also members of the Front which
did its best to give the impression that it was actually supporting Gorbachev and
perestroika. Latvia and Lithuania soon followed Estonia’s example; the Lithuanian
group was known as Sajudis (which simply means ‘movement’). Gorbachev
seemed sympathetic; the hard-line party elites in all three republics were replaced
by more progressive leaders with orders to work with the growing nationalist
movements.
However, Gorbachev was worried that the Baltic nationalist movements were
becoming too extreme. Although he welcomed their support for perestroika,
he was against complete independence and even opposed the idea of more
autonomy for the republics within the USSR. He was having problems with the
Politburo, where Ligachev and the conservatives feared that the situation was on
the brink of disaster. The big protest demonstrations in all three capitals on
23 August 1988, to mark the anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, did nothing to
calm them. According to Ligachev, it was time for some sort of crack-down.
Gorbachev ánd his closest ally, Alexander Yakovlev, realizing that the conserva
tives would have to be appeased, authorized the use of troops; for the first time
t V

force was used to break up a rally in Vilnius» the Lithuanian capital, organized by
Vytautas Landsbergis (28 September 1988). It was also announced that the new
USSR Supreme Soviet would have the power to overrule any laws passed by
the republics, including, of course, any attempts to secede from the USSR. The
announcement only inflamed the situation further, and even the Supreme Soviets
of the three Baltic republics rejected this claim by the Moscow government. The
rejection shocked Gorbachev because it showed that a majority of the members
of the Baltic Communist Parties were supporting the nationalists. The Estonian
Supreme Soviet went further - on 16 November a declaration was passed to the
effect that Estonian legislation took precedence over USSR legislation. This was
a step too far, and Moscow responded by annulling the Estonian declaration. In
lanuary 1989 the Estonians passed a new law, directed at the Russians, requiring
all citizens to learn the Estonian language within four years; Lithuania and Latvia
followed almost immediately with similar language laws.
The elections for the new USSR Congress of People's Deputies in March 1989
came at the right time for the Baltic nationalists because it enabled them to pub
lish their election manifestos. That of Estonia consisted of all the recent resolu
tions passed by their Supreme Soviet, which had been annulled by Moscow - the
sovereignty of their parliament, a free market economy and the existence of
private property. The People’s Fronts won the elections to the Congress in the
Baltic states. In August Moscow responded to the growing pressures with some
concessions: all the national areas were to have more rights, all were to be
treated as equals, and national cultures and languages were to be given free rein.
But this was not nearly enough to satisfy the Baltic peoples; events were moving
rapidly on. Later in the same month of August 1989, the Lithuanian Supreme
Soviet voted that the incorporation of Lithuania into the USSR in 1940 was
illegal; on the 50th anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, two million people took
part in forming a human chain which stretched from Vilnius in Lithuania to
Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. In December the Lithuanian Communist Party, in
a desperate attempt to keep the support of the people, declared itself independ
ent of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev condemned all
these events in the strongest possible terms, although he was reluctant to use
force. In January 1990 he went to Lithuania himself to talk to the leaders; he min
gled with the crowds in Vilnius and talked to ordinary workers. He was taken
aback by the strength of their desire for independence, and tried to persuade
them that once his planned political and economic reforms were completed,
they would be much better off staying in the USSR. He failed; he still could not
understand how strongly the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians felt. Lands
bergis, one of the leaders of Sajudis, and later president of Lithuania, explained it
very clearly and simply: ‘We are an occupied country. To pretend we are grateful
for a little democracy, to go through some sort of referendum to prove our com
mitment to independence, to talk with Mr Gorbachev as anything other than
a foreign leader, is to live a lie... We have never considered ourselves a genuine
part of the Soviet Union. That is something that Gorbachev does not quite
understand. We wish his perestroika well, but the time has come for us to go our
own way.'34 The Baltic peoples, and indeed all the non-Russians, were greatly
encouraged by events in eastern Europe, where, by early 1990, most of the

Soviet satellites had rejected communism and control from Moscow. On 11 March
Lithuania duly declared itself independent and Landsbergis, a non-communist,
was elected President.
Meanwhile in January 1990, the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict had erupted
again. After at least 60 Armenians had been murdered by Azeris in Baku, Moscow
declared a state of emergency. Soviet troops retaliated, killing at least 83 Azeris
(some sources put the dead at over 200). Gorbachev defended this action, claim
ing that it was necessary to bring an end to the atrocities. Probably the real
reason for the intervention was to restore communist control and suppress the
Azerbaijani National Front, whose members had seized the Communist Party
buildings in Baku and had effectively taken control of the capital. This demon
strated that Gorbachev was prepared to use force to keep the USSR together, but
it only made the Azeris more determined than ever to break away. He now
attempted to deal with the growing demands for independence by the Law of
Secession, passed in April 1990. This made secession theoretically possible, but
the process was so slow and complex that it seemed deliberately designed to dis
suade national groups from attempting it. Firstly, two-thirds of the population of
the republic were required to vote for independence in a referendum; this would
be followed by a five-year transition period, and then the Soviet legislature was
required to give its final endorsement. Smaller national groups within the large
republics could opt out of secession and remain in the USSR. This meant that
a republic might lose territory on becoming independent. When Lithuania
declared itself independent, neighbouring Belorussia demanded the return of
the territory of Klaipida which had formerly been part of Belorussia. In the end
everybody simply ignored the Law of Secession, but it was an attempt by
Gorbachev to gain time for his reforms to work, so that the USSR could become
the kind of organization that nobody wanted to leave.35 He saw this as absolutely
vital, since by this time the Soviet Union had lost control of eastern Europe. And
yet although he was desperate to preserve the Union, he wanted to avoid the use
of force.
After Lithuania declared independence in March 1990, Gorbachev continued
his tough line by imposing an economic blockade on Lithuania beginning on
18 April. In June a moratorium was agreed: Lithuania would suspend (but not
cancel) its declaration of independence and in return Gorbachev called off the
blockade. But this could only be a temporary solution, and tension remained
high. By this time the USSR was beginning to disintegrate. Yeltsin had just been
elected Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, which on 8 June, on Yeltsin’s
initiative, declared sovereignty and announced that its laws would take prece
dence over laws passed by the USSR. At the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress,
Yeltsin dramatically resigned from the party and walked out of the Congress.
The Soviet system was now being undermined not only by non-Russian nation
alists, but by leading Russian politicians in Moscow. Speaking as leader of the
Russian republic, Yeltsin told the governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
that he would not support any action to keep them in the USSR by force.
Uzbekistan also declared its sovereignty in June, and in July both Ukraine and
Belorussia followed suit In August it was the turn of Turkmenistan, Armenia
and Tajikistan.
i *
(b) Gorbachev veers left, then right, and left again
For a long time Gorbachev's reaction to these developments in the nationality
problem was to continue with his policy, avoiding violence and trying to slow
down the process of disintegration by using the Law of Secession. The trouble
with this policy was that it satisfied nobody: it was much too slow for the nation
alities who were impatient for independence, while on the other hand the con
servatives wanted him to crack down and use as much force as was necessary to
preserve the Union. Other pressures on Gorbachev were growing too, particu
larly in the economic sphere. The whole economy was on the point of collapse;
the government was forced to take massive loans from Western banks to pay for
the growing imports of grain and consumer goods. Drastic action was needed,
and Gorbachev listened to advice from all sides. Most of the economic experts
seemed to agree that the USSR would have to change from a command economy
to a market economy; the big question was: what was the best way to go over to
the market? Nikolai Ryzhkov, the Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers,
was in favour of a gradual move towards what he vaguely called a ‘regulated
market,’ but he was so cautious that his method seemed likely to take years.
Gorbachev was put off by Ryzhkov’s insistence that food prices would have to
rise in order to balance the budget. His most radical advisers told Gorbachev that
there was no time to wait; action needed to be quick and decisive.
Gorbachev was attracted by the radical ideas of Grigory Yavlinsky, a young
economist working for Yeltsin and the Russian government. He saw this as
a chance to improve relations with Yeltsin; in August 1990 he persuaded Yeltsin
to support the idea of a joint Soviet-Russian team of radical economists to draw
up a plan for rapid marketization. The group produced what became known as
the ‘500 Days Programme’, an extremely impressive (at least on paper) 240-page
document composed mainly by Stanislav Shatalin with help from Yavlinsky.
It was a crash programme involving large-scale privatization, devolution of
power to the republics and the setting-up of market institutions. There was no
mention of socialism, and there was no way that any country with such an
economic system could still be considered communist. Gorbachev signalled his
approval of the documents publicly. And yet, as Archie Brown points out, ‘they
spelled the end of state socialism and were utterly inconsistent with the idea that
Gorbachev was still a Communist in any meaningful sense of the term, even
though he was still General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union!’36 There was pandemonium when the details of the programme became
known. Ryzhkov and his supporters felt that it was unworkable, and he threat
ened to resign and take the entire government with him if Gorbachev tried to
adopt it. The economic ministries and most of the party apparatus were opposed
to it, and so were the KGB and the army which would both have their funding
substantially reduced if the programme was carried out. One of the main points
made by the critics was that since the republics would be in control of their own
economies, that would deprive the central union authorities of most of their
revenue-collecting powers; this would threaten the survival of the Soviet Union
or indeed any other kind of union. Ryzkhov argued that it would cause mass
unemployment and the closure of thousands of factories. Gorbachev himself

began to have second thoughts, and invited another economist to prepare
a comproqiise document combining the best aspects of the 500 Days Programme
and Ryzhkov's more cautious plan. It was this compromise - known as ‘Basic
Guidelines’ - which in October 1990 was accepted by the Supreme Soviet.
However, it was an unsatisfactory crossbreed sort of plan, described by Yeltsin
as like ‘trying to mate a hedgehog with a snake.' What it meant in effect was that
the conservatives had destroyed any possibility of a swift changeover to a market
economy. Should Gorbachev have gambled and pressed ahead with the pro
gramme? The majority of economists now seem to think that, leaving aside
the fierce opposition, the plan was unrealistic and the targets impossible; one
economist said that it was the equivalent of Stalin’s attempts to complete a
Five-Year Plan in three years, and that if it had been implemented, the results
‘would probably have been worse than today.'37
Gorbachev's retreat over tije 500 Days Programme offended Yeltsin and the
radical reformers and ruined the prospect of any further co-operation. Over the
next few months - from October 1990 until March 1991 - he took a distinct move
towards the right. He was obviously worried by the strength of the right-wing
opposition and saw this move as a kind of tactical retreat, or, as he said later, ‘an
attempt to steer a middle course’. On 7 November 1990, during the usual cele
brations to mark the Bolshevik revolution, a man tried to assassinate Gorbachev
with a shot-gun. Fortunately, the guards were alert and he was unharmed. But he
was deeply shocked by the incident, and it may have helped to convince him that
law and order needed to be tightened up. On 18 November his move to the right
became unmistakable; he abolished the Presidential Council, the body which
included his most radical advisers like his close colleague Yakovlev; he gave
himself as President greatly increased powers; and a new Security Council was
set up, with seats for the KGB, army and police. Although Gorbachev repeated
that he was still in favour of reform, it looked as though he was more interested in
strengthening the traditional pillars of the communist state - the KGB, the
nomenklatura and the threat of force. Yeltsin and the radicals were horrified.
On 24 November the first draft appeared of a new Union Treaty, but it was
unacceptable to the republics which felt that it was deliberately vague; it
mentioned ‘joint control’ in many areas of policy, but the republics felt that in
practice the centre would continue to dominate.
Gorbachev's problem was that as his relations with the republics and the
radicals deteriorated, he found himself pushed more closely towards the conser
vatives. Having already sidelined Yakovlev, early in December he sacked his
liberal Minister of the Interior, Vadim Bakatin, and replaced him with Boris Pugo,
a hard-liner and former head of the KGB in Latvia. One of Pugo's first actions was
to confer with the defence minister, Dmitri Yazov, and the head of the KGB,
Vladimir Khryuchkov, both hard-liners; it was arranged that the army would set
up military patrols on the streets of major cities. Gennady Yanayev was appointed
Vice-President; he was another conservative, dedicated to preserving the Union,
and he was a man whom Gorbachev mistakenly felt he could trust. When
Ryzhkov suffered a serious heart-attack in December, he too was replaced by the
more conservative Valentin Pavlov. The hard-liners were becoming more voci
ferous in the Congress of People's Deputies; in October 1990 they formed a group
I V

called Soyuz (Union) which, by the end of the year, numbered about 600
deputies. They were not all communist party members; what united them was
the belief that the Soviet Union was worth preserving, that people should be
proud of its industrial and cultural achievements, and especially proud of the
fact that the USSR had defeated Nazi Germany. They saw Gorbachev as a wrecker
who was out to destroy the greatest state in the world. During the session of the
Congress which met in December 1990, Soyuz speakers called for strong meas
ures to restore order and maintain the unity of the USSR. Gorbachev replied that
he would use all his new presidential powers and if necessary would declare
a state of emergency in any republic which tried to break away illegally.
This was the final straw for Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, the last
liberal member of the government. On 20 December, in a dramatic and emo
tional speech to the Congress, he announced his resignation. For months he had
been subjected to criticism from the army and the armaments industry, but since
October, when the move to the right began, Gorbachev had ceased to support
him, and he felt isolated. The army blamed him as the man who had 'lost' eastern
Europe and allowed German reunification, although they knew perfectly well
that these had been Gorbachev’s decisions. Now his message to the Congress
was that the reforming zeal of the liberals and radicals had been betrayed - by
some of the reformers themselves: 'Comrade democrats, you have run away,’ he
told them; 'Reformers have taken cover. A dictatorship is coming. I am being
completely responsible in stating this. No one knows what kind of dictatorship it
will be or who will come or what the regime will be like. I want to make the fol
lowing statement: I am resigning... Let this be my contribution, if you like,
against the onset of dictatorship.’38 Shevardnadze’s speech caused a sensation;
he had not discussed it beforehand with Gorbachev, who was hurt and embar
rassed, but most importantly it gave notice, both to the people of the USSR and
the rest of the world, of the strong possibility that the conservative backlash
would reverse all the changes of the previous few years. Shevardnadze had no
concrete evidence of an impending coup at this point, but he sensed, correctly,
that sooner or later the conservatives would try to remove Gorbachev.
Events in the Baltic republics soon suggested that there might be something in
Shevardnadze’s warning. On 7 January 1991 Soviet paratroops entered all three
republics with the excuse that they were searching for deserters. The situation in
the republics had become more complicated, since the Russian inhabitants had
organized themselves into pro-Moscow, anti-independence parties, opposed to
the democratically elected governments of the republics. In Vilnius, the capital of
Lithuania, supporters of the pro-Russian party (Edinstvo) stormed the parlia
ment building and called on the Lithuanian government to resign. President
Landsbergis issued an appeal to all Lithuanians to rally to the support of the
republic; a Lithuanian counter-demonstration responded by chasing the Russians
out of the parliament. Russian officials on the spot exaggerated the situation, tell
ing Gorbachev that Lithuania was on the verge of civil war, and calling for the
imposition of presidential rule. Gorbachev accused the Lithuanian government
of trying to ‘restore the bourgeois order' and demanded that they reinstate the
Soviet constitution. Without waiting for a response from the Lithuanian govern
ment, Soviet tanks and troops went into action in Vilnius, occupying key

buildings and seizing the radio and television stations and the television tower,
which was surrounded by some 5000 demonstrators; 14 people were killed and
165 injured, some seriously. Everybody expected an attack on parliament, where
the deputies were in session. However, the attack did not take place; the pres
ence of many foreign journalists' and the television cameras, which had recorded
the bloodshed for all the world to see, no doubt made the military think twice
before repeating the operation. However, a week later in Riga (Latvia) Soviet
troops attacked the Latvian Ministry of Internal Affairs building, killing four
people; but again they stopped short of trying to seize parliament.
The whole Baltic policy was a shambles: it had failed to get rid of the republic
governments or to impose presidential rule. Gorbachev insisted that he had not
given orders for the troops to use force, and the blame was placed on the local
commanders. But although he apologized for the deaths in Riga and reiterated
that the republics did have die right to secede from the USSR, he emphasized
that it must be done on the basis of a referendum and following the rule of law.
‘We cannot permit either unruliness or arbitrariness in this matter, even on the
part of elected bodies/ Yeltsin made the most of the situation, flying to Tallinn
(Estonia) and signing an agreement in which the Russian republic recognized
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as independent sovereign states, not as Soviet
republics. To be fair to him, he was no doubt afraid that the forces of conservatism
might try to overthrow his Russian government in the same way. Gorbachev’s
popularity plummeted alarmingly as a result of the violence in Vilnius and Riga
and he came under severe criticism in the media. There was a massive protest
demonstration in the centre of Moscow in support of the democracy move
ments. The Lithuanians decided to start jumping through the required hoöpsîn
February a referendum was held in which over 90 per cent of those who voted
were in favour of independence. In March, Estonia and Latvia followed suit with
votes of 78 per cent and 74 per cent respectively in favour of independence from
the USSR.
Gorbachev continued with his efforts to reach some sort of consensus on the
new union treaty; on 17 March 1991 a referendum was held throughout the USSR
on the question: ‘Do you consider necessary the preservation of the USSR as
a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, in which the rights and free
doms of an individual of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?’ Although six
republics (the three Baltic states, together with Armenia, Georgia and Moldavia)
refused to take part, their share of the total population was relatively small, and
in fact, over 80 per cent of the Soviet adult population voted; 76.4 per cent were
in favour of the Union. The Russian republic added another question to its refer
endum: ‘Are you in favour of an elected president for Russia?’ Seventy per cent
voted ‘yes’. Now both Gorbachev and Yeltsin could daim that they had mandates -
Gorbachev to reconstitute the USSR as a free association of sovereign republics;
and Yeltsin to hold elections for the president of the Russian republic.
In spite of Gorbachev’s attempts at compromise during the previous six
months, the conservatives were not happy with him; how could they be when he
was clearly bent on breaking up their multi-national state? He was becoming
more impatient with their stubbornness and resistance to reform, and it was
obvious to him that the majority of ordinary people were in favour of Yeltsin and
*v
432 Mastering Twentieth-Century Ru&ian History
reform. Gradually, from March onwards, he began to move away from the
hard-liners and turn back to the advisers with whom he felt most comfortable -
especially Yakovlev, Shakhnazarov, Chemyaev and Primakov. A meeting was
arranged between Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the leaders of the other eight repub
lics which had taken part in the referendum; it was held in a dacha at
Novo-Ogarevo in April 1991, and was the first of a series aimed at producing a
constitution for a new federation. The final version was arrived at in August, but
it was clear long before then that in the new union, the republics would have sov
ereign power and the centre would be reduced to dependency on the goodwill of
the republics for its revenue. The new union would still be known as the USSR,
but now the letters stood for ‘Union of Soviet Sovereign States'. Gorbachev came
under severe attack in the Congress and at one point he even handed in his resig
nation. However, the radicals persuaded him to stay on and the conservatives at
this point lacked the nerve to give him the final push. On 11 July the Congress
approved the general principle of the new union. ‘What have you done, boys?'
a member of the Politburo was reported to have asked the Novo-Ogarevo team.
‘You have thrown away power, and with it the Union.’ The date fixed for the
formal signing of the Union Treaty was 20 August.
Meanwhile on 12 June elections to choose a president were held in the Russian
republic. Yeltsin won a comfortable victory over his five rivals. Significantly, the
man who came bottom of the poll with only just over three per cent of the vote,
was Vadim Bakatin; although he was a liberal reformer, he was still a member of
the communist party, and that was enough to ruin his chances in the eyes of any
voter interested in reform. Yeltsin himself had left the communist party in 1990.
Soon after his election Yeltsin issued a decree banning political activity by any
party, including the communist party, in administrative institutions and eco
nomic enterprises in the Russian republic. However, Gorbachev was determined
to stick with the party for the time being, but it was to be a drastically changed
party. He told a Central Committee meeting in July that ‘our party indisputably
bears responsibility for the fact that it was not able to erect a barrier to despotism
and allowed itself to be used as an instrument of totalitarianism.’ He put forward
a new draft programme based on ‘humane, democratic, market socialism,’
pointing out that the term ‘communism’ was mentioned only in passing. This
was because, he said, ‘our experience provides no grounds for thinking that this
aim is realistically attainable in the foreseeable future.’ The Central Committee
reluctantly adopted the draft programme in July, probably because the conserva
tives, who were in a majority, intended to elect a new General Secretary and drop
the draft programme, at the next party congress, which was due to be held in
November. Most people, including Gorbachev, seemed to think that a split in the
communist party between the reformers and the conservatives was now inevit
able, and he too planned to bring this about at the next party congress. The
difference was, of course, that Gorbachev expected to be on the winning side.39
In a final meeting with Yeltsin at Novo-Ogorevo shortly before he left Moscow for
the family summer holiday at Foros in the Crimea, they discussed the changes
that would be made in the government after the signing of the Union Treaty on
20 August. Prime Minister Pavlov, KGB chief Kryuchkov and Defence Minister
Yazov were all likely to be replaced by more liberal comrades, once the historic

signing had taken place. It later emerged that the dacha had been bugged by the
KGB and the conversations recorded. The discussions must have revealed the
urgency of the need to get rid of Gorbachev, and certainly Yeltsin believes that
this is what decided the timing of the August coup.40
(c) The August c o u p

It was KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov who was the main instigator of the
attempted coup to overthrow Gorbachev. Other members of the plot - all men
appointed and trusted by Gorbachev - included Yanayev, Pavlov, Yazov, Pugo,
and even Valery Boldin, Gorbachev’s own chief of staff. The plan was to set up
a "state committee’ which would declare a state of emergency and introduce the
necessary measures to restore order. Yanayev was to take over as acting presid
ent, while Gorbachev was to be placed under house arrest in the Crimea, cut off
from the outside world. Gorbachev had refused to take any notice of warnings
from Shevardnadze and Yakovlev that he should be on his guard; he simply could
not believe that these people, who owed their positions to him, would turn
against him. On 18 August a small group of the conspirators flew to Foros; they
announced that Yeltsin had been arrested (which was untrue) and demanded
that Gorbachev should hand over his powers ‘temporarily’ to Yanayev while the
state committee restored order and brought the rebellious republics under con
trol. If the conspirators had expected Gorbachev to cave in without resistance
they were very much mistaken. He refused point blank to sign anything, swore at
them, called them criminals and then sent them packing. Meanwhile in Moscow
the coup leaders went on television to announce that Gorbachev had been taken
ill and that a state of emergency was in operation to save the country from dis
orders (Document E). The new Union Treaty, which was due to be signed in
a couple of days’ time, was cancelled.
At this point things began to go wrong for the conspirators. They hacfexpected
that a show of force - some troops and tanks on the streets of Moscow - would be
enough to clinch the operation; very little resistance was anticipated from the
ordinary citizens of Moscow. But they had made several vital blunders: they had
omitted to arrest Yeltsin and other leaders of the Russian republic. They had
failed to understand the extent to which things had changed in the country, that
people were no longer willing to allow themselves to be browbeaten by the KGB
and the party - at least not without putting up a fight. And they had put the
wrong man in charge of military operations in Moscow; this was General Pavel
Grachev, who in the last resort, could not bring himself to desert Gorbachev and
Yeltsin. As soon as Yeltsin heard about the coup he acted swiftly and decisively.
He rushed to the Russian parliament building, known as the White House,
alerted all his colleagues and officials of the Russian government, and broadcast
several appeals denouncing the coup and urging the people of Moscow to come
out and defend the White House and their government (Document F). Shortly
after midday, wearing a bullet-proof jacket under his suit, he strode down the
front steps of the White House and climbed onto a tank to address the demon
strators and the soldiers. ‘Citizens of Russia,’ his voice boomed out, ‘the legally
elected president of this couptry has been removed from power...W e are
i '
dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup d'état... Accord
ingly we proclaim all decisions and decrees of this committee to be illegal... We
appeal to citizens of Russia to give an appropriate rebuff to the putschists and
demand a return of the country to normal constitutional development.' For the
rest of the day the crowds grew until there were at least 25,000, forming a human
chain around the White House (Document G). They passed the time building
barricades and talking to the tank crews, urging them not to fire at their own
people. At the end of the day there were 50,000 troops in the city, and Red Square
and other important points were crammed with tanks.
This was not what the state committee had expected; if the coup was to be suc
cessful they had to take the White House and arrest Yeltsin and his colleagues.
The military commanders were ordered to draw up a plan to storm the building.
Next day more troops and tanks were brought into the city; in one incident three
young protesters were run over by a tank and killed. By this time the White House
was full of deputies and sympathizers who had come in to lend support to Yeltsin
and democracy. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was there, standing guard with
an assault rifle outside Yeltsin's office; so was the poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko
(Document H); Shevardnadze and Yakovlev arrived to offer encouragement. The
atmosphere was tense, and it was by no means certain that they would emerge
alive. Orders were actually given to storm the White House, but one by one the
commanders found excuses to delay action. In the end the members of the state
committee lost their nerve; by midday on 21 August they had decided to termin
ate their coup attempt, and Yazov called off the military action. One of the com
manders later said that it would have been a simple matter to take the White
House; the barricades were flimsy and the tanks could have made short work of
them. But he admitted that although it could all have been over in 15 minutes,
the casualties would have been heavy. Tt was all up to me,' he said. 'Thank God
I couldn't bring myself to do it. It would have been a bloodbath. I refused.' The
coup was over, and the main leaders were eventually arrested, except Pugo, who
committed suicide. Yeltsin was the hero of the hour, and Gorbachev and his
family, who had been under house arrest in their holiday dacha in the Crimea,
were able to return to Moscow.41
Some historians have argued that the coup was not all that it seemed. For
example, Amy Knight has pointed out that during Gorbachev's so-called isola
tion under house arrest, telephones were working in other buildings inside the
compound and in the president's cars. Some members of his personal guards
telephoned home; and how was it that his 32 guards, who were still armed,
offered no resistance to the five officials who were supposed to be holding him
under arrest? The suggestion is that Gorbachev could actually have left Foros at
any time, that he had deliberately isolated himself in the dacha, perhaps in some
sort of collusion with the conspirators, and was waiting to join whichever side
won. Knight also argues that the army never had any intention of storming the
White House and that Kryuchkov had telephoned Yeltsin to tell him so.42Yeltsin
confirms this in his memoirs, but claims, with some justification, that he had not
felt able to trust Kryuchkov. In his memoirs Gorbachev angrily denied any
suggestions of collusion or that it was a self-imposed house-arrest. On the tenth
anniversary of the coup attempt he still appeared outraged that anybody could

take the suggestion seriously: ‘I still had my armed bodyguards. But the place
was surrounded by rings of troops and there were helicopters overhead. I kept
walking around the compound so I could be seen and they1d realise that I was
not ill. Was I supposed to climb over the fence in secret, like a partisan? It's non
sense.’43 Most historians would probably go along with this sentiment; if the
whole thing was a sham, why was it that Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, was so trauma
tized by her experiences? Archie Brown points out that Gorbachev was utterly
devoted to his wife, and that he always discussed everything with her. In add
ition, there is the fact that the conspirators were hoping to reverse all the policies
he had pursued since 1988 - including his Union Treaty, which had become
almost an obsession with him. Most importantly though, ‘it is unthinkable that
for the sake of some illusory political gain Gorbachev would have subjected his
wife to the uncertainty, stress and suffering which she endured between 18 and
21 August 1991, after which hqr health was never to be as strong again.'44
(d) The collapse of the Soviet Union

Gorbachev seemed to think that he could continue as though nothing had
happened. He expected the Union Treaty to be formally approved within a few
days and continued to talk about his new programme for the party: ‘We must do
everything to ensure that the party is reformed and becomes the living force of
perestroika.' He had not understood the extent to which the communist party
was now discredited because of the actions of the hard-liners; it seemed quite
bizarre that he could still talk about reforming the party that had just totally
rejected and betrayed him. Yakovlev told him in private that to talk of the
‘renewal' of the party was like offering first aid to a corpse. However, Yeltsin soon
left him in no doubt that the situation had changed dramatically; at a meeting of
the Russian Supreme Soviet on 23 August he publicly humiliated Gorbachev,
forcing him to read out the list of conspirators and all the people who had collab
orated with them; it included every member of Gorbachev's cabinet except one,
and numerous other people whom he had promoted and trusted, some of whom
had been his friends from student days. It was a heartbreaking tale of desertion
and betrayal. Yeltsin proceeded to suspend the activities of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union on Russian territory along with Pravda and its other news
papers, and to ban the Russian Communist Party. In the words of Martin
McCauley, ‘The Party had attempted to drum Yeltsin out of political life in Octo
ber 1987. Now he drummed the Party out of political life. Revenge was sweet.’45
On 25 August Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the Communist Party;
on 5 September the Congress of People’s Deputies was dissolved, pending new
elections. Gorbechev had lost two of his vital power bases, and the old Soviet
Union was on its last legs.
His main hope now lay in the Union Treaty which would bring into existence
the Union of Sovereign States. This would operate as a single economic unit,
there would be a common foreign and military policy, and there would be regu
lar meetings between the presidents of the states. There would be a president of
the Union - Gorbachev - but he wôuld not take precedence over the others.
However, Yeltsin was not enthusiastic; he was more interested in the internal
I V

politics of the Russian republic where he was planning to introduce a democratic
political system and a market economy. Yeltsin claimed that he had no desire to
break up the Union, yet he seemed to take every opportunity of weakening its
chances of survival. Complications arose for Gorbachev when the Ukrainian
President, Leonid Kravchuk, refused to take part in discussions or send represen
tatives. On 1 December a referendum was held in Ukraine, showing a large
majority - over 90 per cent - in favour of complete independence from the USSR;
a large majority of the Russian inhabitants of Ukraine had voted for independ
ence. Soon afterwards Kravchuk was elected president with over 60 per cent of
the vote; it was announced that Ukraine would not sign a Union Treaty which
had a central governing body, and would set up its own armed forces. This was
the death blow for the Union Treaty and the Union of Sovereign States; the three
Baltic states had already declared independence; without Ukraine, the state
with the second largest population after Russia itself, the new union was a non
starter.
Yeltsin now took the initiative and had a meeting with Kravchuk and Stanislav
Shushkevich, the leader of Belarus (as Belorussia was now known), near the
Belarusian capital of Minsk. On 8 December it was announced that since the
USSR was in the process of dying, the three of them had agreed to the formation
of a much weaker union than the one proposed in the Union Treaty; it was to be
known as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). It was to be a purely
voluntary association; any decisions it reached were not binding, and it had no
powers to collect taxes. However, there would be a joint unified military com
mand, a unified economic area and central offices; these were to be in Minsk, not
Moscow. Most significant of all - there would be no president. All this was
decided without consulting Gorbachev, although Yeltsin met him on 9 December
and gave him the details. Gorbachev was furious; apart from the fact that he was
soon likely to be out of a job, Yeltsin’s action was, arguably, unconstitutional; US
President Bush had even been told about the plans before Gorbachev himself.
The other republics were invited to join the CIS, and eventually, at a ceremony in
Alma-Ata (the capital of Kazakhstan) on 21 December, eleven of the former
Soviet republics signed the agreement. The USSR and the position of President of
the USSR would cease to exist at midnight on 31 December 1991. Gorbachev had
not been invited to Alma-Ata. The four states which declined the invitation were
the three Baltic republics and Georgia. It must have been a bitter experience for
Gorbachev; when he introduced his policies of glasnost and perestroika, he could
surely never have imagined that they would lead to the destruction of the vast
union of which he was the leader. Now, that union had disappeared, and it only
remained for him to resign with as much dignity as he could muster. He resigned
formally on 25 December, making a short and dignified speech on television.
He acknowledged that mistakes had been made and that many things could
have been done better. He listed what he considered to be some of the achieve
ments of his period in office, mentioning the end of the Cold War, the move away
from a totalitarian system and towards democratic reforms, the recognition of
human rights, and the beginnings of a move towards a market economy. ‘Sadly,’
he concluded, ‘the old system tumbled down before the new one could begin
functioning.’

10.6 Assessments of Gorbachev
(a) Was Gorbachev a failure?
How does the historian begin to*assess a figure of such immense importance as
Gorbachev, whose actions had such sensational results for the USSR and for the
rest of the world? At the time of his downfall, and for some years afterwards,
a majority of people in Russia dismissed him as a failure, though for different
reasons. The old communists, who believed that the Soviet Union and the party
still had a lot to offer and were worth preserving, saw him as a traitor. Viktor
Alksnis, who was a member of the Soyuz group in the Supreme Soviet, is con
temptuous of Gorbachev's refusal to use force. Mark Galeotti, who quotes
Alksnis, goes on to note, disturbingly, that: ‘Past Russian and Soviet leaders have
rarely shied away from the use of violence. It may have made Gorbachev a better
human being, but it also made him a failure as a politician.’46The more radical of
the reformers, like the free marketeers, felt that he stayed with the communist
party for too long, trying to reform the unreformable. The great mass of ordinary
people, who just wanted an efficient and decisive government which could
provide them with a decent standard of living, thought that he was weak and
incompetent, a leader who foolishly set the country on the road to chaos, who
talked too much and did not act enough. A woman in the street in Moscow told
BBC correspondent John Simpson: ‘There’s no food, no cars, nothing in the
shops. What’s the point of having money when there's nothing to buy? I tell you
honestly, I’ve come to hate Gorbachev... And I’ll tell you something else, I hate
the bloody communists as well. They've wrecked this country and don’t have the
faintest idea how to put things right.’47 An American observer of Soviet society,
John Bushnell, wrote: Few national leaders have failed so spectacularly as
Mikhail Gorbachev: in 1985 he set out to reanimate Soviet society and economy,
by the end of 1991 he had managed without benefit of war to destroy the Soviet
state and lose for Russia the territorial gains of more than three centurie^.'48
This is surely far too simplistic a conclusion. In fact, his career was a mixture of
brilliant successes and disappointing failures. Gorbachev had a whole range of
aims and goals; although it may be true that in 1985 he was thinking primarily in
terms of reforming the communist system, it is important to recognize that his
aims changed as time passed. In 1985 he genuinely believed that the communist
party could be reformed and modernized, and that once this was achieved, there
could be no better system. The party would be a force for stability (not stagna
tion) and progress. However, Gorbachev discovered that the majority of the
party - the elite and the bureaucracy - was resisting change for their own selfish
reasons; by the end of 1987 he was becoming increasingly impatient with the
party and its corruption. Throughout the Brezhnev era the leaders had turned
a blind eye to the corruption which was rife at all levels of activity. One Soviet
academic noted in 1988 that the system was riddled with racketeers and black-
market operators; anybody who was an official of any sort was direcdy connected
to public property at some level, and people did not hesitate to lay hands on it for
themselves. ‘To refrain, to be disgusted, was self-injuring and finally stupid,
a gesture which might appease the conscience but actually made no practical
i
difference... Those who are intelligent, energetic and callous enough will end up
managing the most crucial sectors of government administration: first the
economy and then politics/ It was Marxism inverted: each was receiving not
according to his needs but according to his ability to take.49 As the enormity of
the problem became clear to Gorbachev, he changed his goals: if the party
refused to reform itself, then the party would have to lose its dominant role. He
reached the conclusion that he would have to reduce the role of the party in thè
economy, introduce elections for the Soviets, and give them a greater part to
play. There can be no doubt that by the summer of 1988 he had dropped much of
his Marxist-Leninist thinking; the more he saw of the political and economic
systems in western Europe, the more he liked them, although he recognized that
they were far from perfect What appealed to him most was the social democrat
model of socialism within a multi-party system. As for the ultimate goal of achiev
ing a Communist Society, he had decided that this was illusory. Gorbachev's new
thinking also extended to foreign affairs: he wanted a new relationship with
the rest of the world; confrontation and the prospect of nuclear war were
unacceptable to him; what he called ‘universal human values' were more
important to him than class interests.
By the end of 1990 Gorbachev could claim considerable success in achieving
these goals. The political scene had changed dramatically since 1985: the highly
repressive communist system had gone and there were now strong elements of
democratization to be seen. Archie Brown is convinced that, at least from
the summer of 1988, it was a conscious aim on Gorbachev’s part to transform the
political system. ‘From the spring of 1989 it is scarcely meaningful to describe the
Soviet Union as a Communist system... The greatest part of Marxist-Leninist
dogma had been abandoned by then - and by the party leader himself - and so
had the most important defining characteristics of a Communist system.’ He
goes on to explain that, as he sees it, there are five defining features of
a Communist system: the supreme authority of the party; a highly centralized,
strictly disciplined party; state ownership of the means of production; the aim of
building Communism as the ultimate goal; a sense of belonging to an interna
tional Communist movement. By March 1990, when the famous Article 6 of the
Soviet Constitution was dropped, much of this had disappeared.50 Gorbachev's
other great achievement was to bring an end to the Cold War. And again,
although the West responded sympathetically to Gorbachev's new thinking, it
was Gorbachev who took the initiative. However, events in eastern Europe were
not seen as an achievement by the army and the traditionalists; the ‘loss’ of the
satellite states and above all the reunification of Germany were regarded as the
nullification of everything that the USSR had achieved in the Second World War.
Many critics say that he should have bargained with the West and got something
in return; since the Warsaw Pact had been dissolved, perhaps Gorbachev could
have tried to persuade the West to phase out NATO, since both were relics of the
Cold War.
Gorbachev's great failures were in the economy and in his nationalities policy,
leading to the ultimate tragedy - for him - of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
One of the criticisms most often made of Gorbachev is that he did not think his
ideas on economic reform through carefully enough. According to economist

Nodari Simonía» he did not have a detailed economic programme, and neither
did any ofxhis advisers; he just told people to show initiative and start a revolu
tion from bélow; unfortunately, the Soviet citizens were not very good at showing
initiative. Simonía believes that Gorbachev should have started his economic
reforms by privatizing agriculture and small businesses; although private
co-operatives were allowed later, he failed to give them sufficient support when
they ran into resistance from party conservatives.51 Gorbachev certainly did not
want to destroy the USSR, and right to the end he fought tooth and nail to pre
serve some sort of Union. But unfortunately he failed to understand the strength
of nationalist feeling, especially in the three Baltic states. If he could have brought
himself to acknowledge that the Baltic states had a genuine case for independ
ence (the fact that in August 1939 Molotov and Ribbentrop had signed secret
protocols allowing the USSR to occupy the republics, which was illegal in inter
national law - see section 7.1(d)) and permitted them to leave the Union, this
would have avoided the violence in Vilnius and Riga. Yet he violated his own
policy of glasnost by claiming that the original documents, which proved that the
agreement had actually taken place, were 'not available.’ In fact the documents
were in the party archives and Gorbachev himself had seen them as early as July
1987.52
Even without the Baltic states it should have been possible to construct
a viable new federation along the lines of Gorbachev’s Union Treaty, which was
on the verge of being signed before the August coup. It is difficult to resist the
conclusion that Yeltsin bears more of the responsibility than Gorbachev for the
failure to get the new federation off the ground. Although in public Yeltsin
repeatedly denied any desire to break up the Union, his advisers had been Work-
ing on plans for Russia’s complete secession long before the August coup. And
Yeltsin himself seemed to be seizing every chance to weaken the proposed
Union, until in the end it was to be a Union without a president. It looks very
much as though Yeltsin wanted to get rid of Gorbachev, so that he would be
supreme in Moscow, and would be able to press ahead with his radical policies of
democracy and the market economy without interference from the USSR or
Gorbachev. The hostility between Yeltsin and Gorbachev was one of saddest
features of the situation. On the surface it looked as though they ought to have
been close allies; some of the radicals thought that Gorbachev as president and
Yeltsin as vice-president would make the perfect team. But Yeltsin wanted to go
further and faster than Gorbachev; and apart from that, there seems to have been
a basic clash of personalities: Yeltsin was extrovert, ebullient, charismatic and
populist; ‘it is tempting,’ suggests Martin McCauley, ‘to regard Gorbachev’s jeal
ousy of Yeltsin's charismatic populism as the root of the problem.’ Certainly
Gorbachev was not the easiest person to work with; by December 1990 he had
fallen out with nearly all his team. ‘He appeared to be jealous of his primacy. He
wanted the limelight for himself. He could not tolerate someone else as an
equal... By banishing Yeltsin, [in November 1987] Gorbachev was turning him
into a political enemy at a tíme when the political battle for perestroika was just
beginning. It was a fateful mistake.’53Another fatal mistake was that Gorbachev
failed to realize the extent to which glasnost and perestroika were undermining
the political and economic foundations of the Soviet system and actually making
I V
440 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rustan History

the situation worse. As Robert Service puts it: 'Localism, nationalism, corruption,
illegal private profiteering and distrust of official authority: all these phenomena,
which had grown unchecked under the rule of Brezhnev, had been reinforced by
the dismantlement of central controls undertaken by Gorbachev. He was Russia’s
“holy fool”, and like the “holy fool” he did not know it.'54
In spite of all his mistakes and failures, Gorbachev's unquestionable achieve
ments entitle him to be regarded as one of the greatest reformers in Russian
history, and perhaps the individual who made the most profound impact on
world history in the second half of the twentieth century. Archie Brown sums up
his achievements: ‘He played the decisive part in allowing the countries of
Eastern Europe to become free and independent. He did more than anyone else
to end the Cold War between East and West. He went along with, encouraged,
and (in important respects) initiated fundamental rethinking about politics -
radically new thinking in the Soviet context about the political and economic
systems he inherited and about better alternatives. He presided over, and facili
tated, the introduction of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of
association, religious freedom, and freedom of movement, and left Russia a freer
country than it had been in its long history.'55 One of the most remarkable things
about these changes is that they were achieved peacefully; it is very much to Gor
bachev's credit that he always did his best to avoid using force; many of his close
associates testified to this and make the point that if bloodshed did take place, as
in Vilnius, Riga and Baku, then this was seen by Gorbachev as a failure of politics.
Dmitri Volkogonov, not noted for his admiration of Soviet leaders, nevertheless
finds some praise for Gorbachev: ‘he launched the most fundamental and
irreversible changes in Soviet history since Lenin... He does not deserve blame,
nor does he need vindication. I believe that the historic outcome of those unfor
gettable years of perestroika outweigh all of Gorbachev’s mistakes and miscalcu
lations. The invaluable fruit of his reformation was the liberty which has given
the former Soviet society a chance to attain a prosperous and democratic way of
life... If he does not evoke sympathy among his contemporaries, he has certainly
earned the gratitude of future generations.'56
(b) Was the communist system reformable?

It would be good to be able to report that there is a viable alternative system to
the present all-pervading capitalism, with its many imperfections and its gro
tesque inequalities. In his early days as an active party member, and even when
he became General Secretary, Gorbachev believed that Lenin and Bukharin were
laying the foundations for such a system. The tragedy was firstly that Lenin died
so early before people had had a chance to find out what he really did intend; and
secondly that Stalin hi-jacked the fledgling system and turned into a monstrous
horror-story far worse than anything that even the Russians, with their long
history of repressive regimes, had experienced before. Stalinism was a viable
system, but one that was only sustainable by violence and terror. Gorbachev
knew that well; like most families, his had suffered under Stalin: both his grand
fathers had spent time in labour camps, and three of his uncles had died during
the famine of 1932. Yet Gorbachev was convinced at first that the situation was

retrievable. The party must be open and frank about its faults: Stalin had gone off
the rails. Khrushchev had taken the first step towards normality by putting an
end to the purges and killings, but then Brezhnev had let things stagnate. Now
Gorbachev was ready to take the next major step towards normality: he would
shake up and modernize the party apparatus and get things back on track.
But was the communist system capable of being reformed? Could it have
survived if Gorbachev had followed different policies? Many Russians would
answer emphatically ‘yes’ to both questions. Andranik Migranyan, a political
analyst who for a time was a member of Gorbachev’s presidential council, argues
that the USSR should have followed the example of China, where priority was
given to economic reform in a gradual programme stretching over several years.
He believes that the USSR should have put into operation a carefully worked out
programme lasting ten years. Instead, they attempted to rush reform through in
several areas at once - in politics, in the economy, in foreign affairs and in the
nationalities problem, and the strain proved too great for the system. Others
believe that the system was beyond reform; it has often been noted that any
political system or party which enjoys a long, uninterrupted period in power
becomes arrogant, complacent and corrupt. Examples cited include the Indian
Congress Party which ruled continuously for 30 years after India gained its inde
pendence; and the Christian Democrat Party in Italy after 1945. In the case of the
communist party, critics argue that, after 70 years in power, Marxism-Leninism
was incapable of responding positively to changing circumstances, and claim
that by 1991 the vast majority - perhaps as many as 80 per cent - of party mem
bers did not really believe the basic tenets of the ideology; they were only in the
party to further their careers. Volkogonov talks about the total bankruptcy: of
Marxism-Leninism by the late 1980s; ’the Communist system was not reformable,’
he states categorically. ‘Either it exists, or it does not.’57
And yet, Migranyan’s arguments are persuasive; given the USSR’s material
advantages, it should have been possible, with a planned economy, to mobilize
all that enormous potential so that its citizens enjoyed a life of reasonable com
fort and prosperity. Admittedly the climate is a problem, but it had the great,
fertile ‘Black Earth’ agricultural belt and vast resources, including plenty of
water, oil and coal, almost half of the world’s natural gas reserves, massive tim
ber forests, and gold and diamonds. Yet living standards were falling, the major
ity of people were impoverished and Soviet women spent a large proportion of
their time queuing for non-existent goods in the shops.
Why was the economic system failing so badly? The main problem was that the
system was over-centralized and extremely complex. As industry expanded
rapidly under Stalin, a great army of bureaucrats and managers was created to
run the state and the economy; eventually the whole system became so huge and
so complex that it was almost impossible for the planners at the centre to collect
the information they needed. Their function was to gather information about the
production potential of every factory and enterprise throughout the Soviet
Union, and then to hand out the targets to each one. Under Stalin, when the pen
alty for failure to meet targets could be execution or a long spell in a labour camp,
managers got into the habit of sending in low estimates of their potential output
so that they would be given easy targets. After Stalin’s death, when the threat of
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442 Mastering Twentieth-Century Ru§sian History

severe punishments was removed, the bureaucrats became entrenched and
began to run the country and the economy in their own interests. This system
reached its peak under Brezhnev; as Martin McCauley explains, ‘so intricate did
the system become that it had, naturally, a strong bias against innovation. This
was because innovation involved remaking the web of contacts necessary to
make the new product... The uncertainty of the supply system led to enterprises
getting larger and integrating production. Kamaz, the largest truck plant in the
USSR, produced 150,000 lorries annually at Naberezhny Chelny in Tatarstan. It
had its own foundry, tyre plant and so on. The natural trend towards monopoly
meant that a particular product could often only be obtained from one factory in
the USSR.’58
This system gave rise to all kinds of incredibly inefficient and wasteful prac
tices. There was the example of a cement-making plant and the factory which
made plastic bags for cement. The two had been built side by side in a small town
about 500 miles from Moscow. There was only a fence between them, but the
two were not allowed to trade together. The central planners required the plastic
bags to be sent to Moscow - over bad roads and with inadequate transport. The
cement factory, while it waited for its share of the bags to be sent all the way
back, carried on with production in order to fulfil its targets. Often there was
nowhere to store the newly-made cement, so it had to be dumped out in the fac
tory yard. The rain quickly turned it into small hills as hard as rock. As far as the
managers of the two factories were concerned, they had met their production
targets, and it was somebody else’s job to get the cement and the bags to the
customers.59 This sort of example, bizarre as it seems, was repeated in similar
ways throughout the whole economy, which consequently was also inefficient
and wasteful. The fact that there was no competition of any sort, or any element
of the market, removed incentives to increase productivity or to improve quality.
Another key reason for the economic crisis was the massive burden of defence
spending. The military-industrial complex accounted for about one-third of the
entire economy, and it had first choice of resources. When President Reagan
embarked on his Star Wars project, he knew perfectly well that the USSR would
have to try to keep up, and in doing so, would, he hoped, irreparably damage
their economy. In this way, the USA and the West could claim that they had
played a vital part in the destruction of communism and the USSR (Document I).
In theory, with the ending of the Cold War, defence spending should have been
reduced to more manageable proportions. Given time, with the reallocation of
resources, the crisis would have passed and the economy, arguably, would have
recovered. However, there was no time; the economic collapse, together with all
the other problems, was enough to finish off the communist system and the USSR.
Much has been written about the Chinese communists and how they reformed
their economic system.60 Why did Communism survive in China but not in the
USSR? By the early 1970s it was clear that the Chinese command economy, like
that in the USSR, was failing to improve living standards for the rapidly expanding
population. Almost in desperation, in the late 1970s, the Chinese embarked on a
gradual reform of the economy, starting with agriculture. The state sector in indus
try remained, but its monopoly was relaxed and so competition was introduced.
The state sold shares and bonds to workers. The results were impressive: there

was a dramatic and sustained growth in the economy, and although there were
some problems - inflation, with wages lagging behind prices - the Chinese had
proved that it is possible to reform a command economy by gradual change. The
ultimate Chinese goal is to achieve a full ‘socialist market economy.’ The prob
lem for the Chinese government was that the successful economic reforms gave
rise to demands for political reform, but from the beginning, the Chinese leader,
Deng Xiaoping, had rejected the idea of economic and political reform being
introduced at the same time. In June 1989, as the tensions and the demon
strations built up in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the leadership turned to
repression. The army cleared the square, killing between 1500 and 3000 of the
demonstrators, and they clamped down on the democracy movement in other
parts of the country. For about 18 months after the Tiananmen Square massacre,
the Chinese leadership, now dominated by its more conservative members,
abandoned its economic reforms and returned to central control. But the results
were so disastrous in 1989 and 1990 that the government resumed its previous
reform policies and headed towards a market economy again. No doubt political
reform will have to come sooner or later, but for the time being communism is
surviving - along with a reasonably efficient economy.
Why did Gorbachev not follow the Chinese model? Alexander Yakovlev, among
others, strongly advised him to try the Chinese way, but Gorbachev believed that
the situation was so different in the USSR that the Chinese model would not work
there. For example, the Chinese economy was still about 80 per cent agricultural,
and neither industry nor agriculture had ever been as centralized as they were in
the USSR. The Soviet economy was overburdened by the military-industrial
complex, whereas the Chinese spent a much smaller proportion of their budget
on armaments. There seemed to be more urgency in the Soviet situation; the
Chinese programme worked gradually, and in 1987, when the Soviet leadership
first realized the gravity of the economic crisis, Chinese reforms had been under
way for almost ten years. This was when the Soviet leadership took the fateful
decision that political reform was necessary to weaken the obstructive powers of
the bureaucracy and so enable economic reform to be pushed through. Unfortu
nately, they seemed to concentrate on the political reforms and were uncertain
which course of economic reform to follow. By 1989 the economic crisis was
worse, and decisive action was needed. However, this was the time when the
Chinese government had dropped its market reform policies for the time being,
suggesting that they were not a success. This convinced Gorbachev that the
USSR should also reject any moves towards the market; in October 1990
the decision was taken to stick with central control. But it wasn’t long before th.e
Chinese realized their mistake and in 1991 returned to those policies leading ultim
ately to a market economy. In the words of Martin McCauley: ‘The flexible and
pragmatic Chinese leadership chose to return to the market while holding the
fort against political reform... Gorbachev was unfortunate that he had to make
his decision - that the economy had to be managed from the centre - in 1990.
That decision precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union.'61
In theory then, it should have been possible to effect an economic transform
ation in the USSR without precipitating a crisis, and thereby enabling the Union
to continue for many more years. But it may have been necessary to use force, as

the Chinese government did. In that case, given Gorbachev's reluctance to cause
bloodshed, the prospects for success would not seem promising. Dmitri Furman,
a former Gorbachev colleague, believes that ‘the fall of Soviet power and the fall of
the Communist party were inevitable. But they could have happened in various
ways and at various times, like a death. If a different person had become general
secretary, the Soviet system could have lasted another 20 years.’62The real key to
the regime’s chances of survival was: could it ‘get the economy right’? It would
have been extremely difficult, given all the resistance and obstructionism of the
bureaucracy and the party apparatus. This of course is why Gorbachev thought it
was vital to dismantle the apparatus and bring new personnel in - the political
changes at the same time as the economic changes. This was the big difference
between the Chinese and Soviet reforms. But although the logic seems clear, it
turned out to be Gorbachev's most serious mistake: he had weakened the appar
atus, but at the same time he had undermined his own power to implement
policy. Vladimir Bukovsky, a reformer and social democrat who, from 1980 lived
in exile in England, confirms this view: ‘His only instrument of power was the
Communist Party, but his reforms weakened precisely that instrument. He was
like the proverbial man sawing off the branch on which he was sitting. There
could be no other outcome except what happened.'63 By the time the leadership
had eventually settled on what they thought was the correct economic programme,
in the words of Alec Nove, ‘the means to enforce it no longer existed. This, as well
as doubts and hesitations about how far and how fast the reform programme
should go, plus the disastrous monetary and fiscal policy (or lack of policy), led to
failure. Add the centrifugal forces of nationalism and regionalism, and one had
collapse. What was there that could hold it all together?'64
(c) The legacy of communism

Any country ruled by the same regime for over 70 years is bound to bear the
marks of the system, for good or ill. Communism in Russia left plenty of both,
though most historians feel that the achievements of communism are outweighed
by its ill-effects. But no system could have survived for so long by force alone; one
important achievement was that the Soviet system brought benefits in the form
of promotion and reasonably well-paid jobs with privileges to large numbers of
people from ‘lower class' backgrounds who had been excluded from such things
under the tsarist regime. Education and literacy became more widespread; even
under Stalin, Soviet ‘culture’ was encouraged, and so was sport; the performing
arts, particularly music, were subsidized by the state. Science was given special
prominence and funding. Although the methods left much to be desired, another
major achievement of the Soviet state was to modernize a country which was still
in many ways backward. Perhaps its greatest achievement was that it defeated
the evil regime of Hitler and the Nazis, for which the whole world should be
eternally grateful. After Stalin's death, although in one sense the system stag
nated, it brought a certain stability and an improved standard of living for the
majority of its people. As will be seen in the next chapter, during the 1990s there
was a good deal of support, especially among older people, for the reformed
Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and even for the USSR.

On the other hand the Soviet system left behind a whole range of problems
which would make it extremely difficult for any succeeding regime to transform.
The economic system was rigid, over-centralized and in need of a complete
overhaul. Individual initiative and entrepreneurial spirit had been stifled for
generations.The one-party political system, the impossibility of public debate
and criticism, and the close control of the media meant that most people knew
little about democracy and party politics. The enormous class of privileged
bureaucrats and administrators opposed any radical changes. The country was
overburdened with its vast military expenditure. Boris Yeltsin had been highly
critical of all these aspects of the Soviet system, and had played a vital role in
bringing about its demise. Would he be able to do any better?
Documents
(A) Nikolai Shmelev, a radical economist, complains about the state of the eco
nomy, in an article in Novy Mir in June 1987, an article which could not have
appeared openly before the introduction of glasnost.
At present our economy is characterized by shortages, imbalances, [it is]

unmanageable and almost unplannable... Industry now rejects up to 80 per
cent of technical decisions and inventions... The working masses have
reached a state of almost total lack of interest in honest labour... Apathy,
indifference, thieving have become mass phenomena, with simultaneous
aggressive envy towards those who are capable of earning. There have
appeared signs of physical degradation of a large part of our population,
through drunkenness and idleness. Finally there is disbelief in the officially
announced objectives and purposes, in the very possibility of a more rational
economic and social organization of life. Clearly all this cannot beNquickly
overcome - years, perhaps generations, will be needed.
Source: quoted in Martin McCauley, Gorbachev, p. 68.
(B) Extracts from Gorbachev’s speech to a gathering of communist leaders in the

Kremlin, 2 November 1987, during the 70th anniversary celebrations.
Dear Comrades! Esteemed foreign guests! Seven decades separate us from the
unforgettable days of October 1917, from those legendary days that became
the starting point of a new epoch of human progress... If today we look into
our history with an occasionally critical gaze, it is only because we want to get
a better, fuller idea of our path into the future.
It is perfectly obvious that the lack of the proper level of democratization of
Soviet society was precisely what made possible both the cult of personality
and the violations of the law, arbitrariness and repressions of the thirties -
to be blunt, real crimes based on the abuse of power. Many thousands of
446 Mastering Twentieth-Century rfuîan History

members of the party and non-members were subjected to mass repressions.
That, comrades, is the bitter truth. Serious damage was done to the cause of
socialism and the authority of the party, and we must speak bluntly about it.
This is essential for the final and irreversible assertion of Lenin's ideal of
socialism.
The guilt of Stalin and those close to him is immense and unforgivable...
even now we still encounter those who try to ignore and hush up these sensi
tive questions, and to pretend that nothing special happened. We cannot agree
with this. It would be a neglect of historical truth... Neither the grossest errors
nor the deviations from the principles of socialism could turn our people from
the path they embarked upon in 1917... We are travelling to a new world, the
world of Communism. We shall never deviate from this path. [Prolonged and
stormy applause.]
Source: quoted in David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, pp. 49-51.
(C) Extracts from Nina Andreyeva’s letter in Sovetskaya Rossiya, 13 March 1988,
and from her conversations with David Remnick, an American journalist.
From the letter. The subject of repressions has been blown out of all propor
tion in some young people’s imagination and overshadows any objective
interpretation of the past. Stalin may have made some ‘mistakes’ but who else
could have built the country up so quickly, prepared it for the great victory
against the Nazis? They try to make us believe that the country’s past was
nothing but mistakes and crimes, keeping silent about the great achievements
of the past and present. There is no question that [the Stalin era] was extremely
harsh. But we prepared people for labour and defence without destroying
their spiritual worlds with masterpieces imported from abroad or with home
grown imitations of mass culture.
From her conversation with David Remnick: The thing is, we may not need
an iron hand, but in any state there must be order. This is not a state we have
now, it is like some anarchistic gathering... An anti-socialist movement
is taking shape in the form of democratic unions and popular fronts. The
number of ecological disasters is growing. There is a decline in the level of
morality. There is a cult of money. The prestige of honest, productive labour
has been undermined... In the four years of perestroika they have under
mined the trust of working people - because they have spit on our past
... An unpredictable future cannot be a basis for a normal working existence
of the current generation. In the past, a person going to bed at night knew
that in the morning he’d go to work and have free medical care - not very
skilled care, but free nonetheless. And now we don’t even have these
guarantees.
Source: quoted in Remnick, pp. 78-82.

(D) David Remnick gathers local opinion on the reasons for the collapse of the
USSR.
%
As I traveled around the Union, opinions varied on when and where the old
regime died. Uzbeks in Tashkent and Samarkand told me that the exposure in
around 1988 and 1989 of the callous way Moscow had turned all of Central
Asia into a vast cotton plantation - in the process destroying the Aral Sea and
nearly every other area of the economy - was the turning point In the Baltic
states, the official ‘discovery’ of the secret protocols to the Nazi-Soviet pact
were the key moment... On a trip to the western Ukrainian city of Lvov in
1989,1met with small groups of nationalists who promised that ‘one day’ their
republic of over fifty million people, the biggest after Russia, would strike out
for independence and do far more damage to the union than the tiny Baltic
states ever could... The old regime collapsed metaphorically on April 26,
1986, at the moment of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl... Within weeks of
the accident, people realized that ‘Chernobyl’ meant ‘wormwood’, and then
pointed to Revelation 8.10-11: ‘A great star shot from the sky, flaming like
a torch; and it fell on a third of the rivers and springs; and a third of the water
turned to wormwood, and men in great numbers died of the water because it
was poisoned.’
The accident at Chernobyl embodied every curse of the Soviet system, the
decay and arrogance, the wilful ignorance and self-deception. Yuri Shcherbak
was a physician and journalist who led the fight in Ukraine to publicize the
medical and ecological hazards of the accident. ‘If it weren’t for the danger,’
[he said] ‘they should leave the Chernobyl plant standing. It could be the great
monument to the Soviet empire.'
Source: Remnick, pp. 243-7.

\
(E) The radio broadcast announcing the coup of August 1991 against Gorbachev.
\
We are addressing you at a grave, critical hour for the future of the Mother
land and of our peoples. A moral danger has come to loom large over our
great Motherland. The policy of reforms, launched at Mikhail Gorbachev’s
initiative and designed as a means to ensure the country's dynamic develop
ment and the democratization of social life, have entered for several reasons
into a blind alley. All democratic institutions created by the popular will are
losing weight and effectiveness right in front of our eyes. This is the result of
purposeful actions by those who, grossly violating the fundamental law of the
USSR, are in fact staging an unconstitutional coup and striving for unbridled
personal dictatorial powers...
The country is sinking into a quagmire of violence and lawlessness. Never
before in national history has the propaganda of sex and violence assumed
such a scale, threatening the health and lives of future generations. Millions of
448 Mastering Twentieth-Century hg^sian History

people are demanding measures against the octopus of crime and glaring
immorality.
Source: quoted in Remnick, pp. 461-2.
(F) Broadcast by Boris Yeltsin during the August coup attempt.
Soldiers and officers of the army, the KGB, and the troops of the Interior
Ministry! Countrymen! The country is faced with the threat of terror. At this
difficult hour of decision remember that you have taken an oath to your
people, and your weapons cannot be turned against the people. You can erect
a throne of bayonets but you cannot sit on it for long. The days of the conspir
ators are numbered... Clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over
Russia, but this night will not be eternal and our long-suffering people will
find freedom once again, and for good. Soldiers, I believe at this tragic hour
you will make the right decision. The honour of Russian arms will not be
covered with the blood of the people.
[Later, standing on the White House balcony, he spoke to the crowds] The
junta used no restraint in grabbing power, and the junta feels itself under no
restraint in keeping i t ... Doesn't Yazov have his hands covered in blood from
other republics? Hasn't Pugo bloodied his hands in the Baltics and the
Caucasus? Whoever fulfils the commands of this illegal committee will be
prosecuted!... I am convinced that here, in democratic Moscow, aggression
of the conservative forces will not win out. Democracy will. And we will stay
here as long as it takes for the junta to be brought to justice!
Source: quoted in Remnick, pp. 467,476.
(G) David Remnick describes the scene outside the White House during the coup.
On the barricades outside, as people milled around, their feet sloshing in the
puddles, there were new rumours every minute, and every rumour went out
over the radio. I saw one man, a vet in his old jungle fatigues, holding a stick in
one hand for protection and a bottle of vodka in the other for bravery. The
most reassuring sight was the way the soldiers in their tanks welcomed kids
aboard and flirted with the girls. There was hope in that.
And there was real hope in the grit of these people. I talked with a middle-
aged woman, Regina Bogachova, who said she would sooner be crushed by
a tank than move. T am ready to die right here, on this spot. I will not move.
I am 55 years old and for years nothing but obedience was pounded into my
brain. The Young Pioneers, the Young Communist League, the Communist
Party, all of them taught me not to answer back. To be a good Soviet, a screw
in the machine... I heard a rumbling and I went out on to my balcony and
0continued)

saw the tanks rumbling down below. These monsters! They have always
thought^they could do anything to us. They have thrown Gorbachev out and
now they are threatening a government I helped elect. I will ignore the curfew
and I'll die right here if I have to!’
Source: Remnick, p. 478.
(H) Verse by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko; he wrote it during the coup and read
it out from the balcony of the White House.
No! Russia will not fall again on her knees for interminable years,
With us are Pushkin, Tolstoy.
With us stands the whole awakened people.
And the Russian parliament, like a wounded marble swan of freedom,
defended by the people, swims into immortality.
Source: quoted in Remnick, p. 476.
(I) General Leonid Shebarshin, a KGB director, reveals his thoughts about
Gorbachev, foreign affairs and the collapse of the USSR.
It should have been possible to jettison totalitarianism over a period of time

through careful consideration of ways and means. I do not believe that
Gorbachev thought his reforms were going to destroy communism. I accept
that he was trying to resurrect it... Anyone could see things were not moving
in the right direction. I was presiding over the disintegration of the empire.
Receiving the vital information from the KGB, Gorbachev did noi-study it
and draw conclusions. I don't think he took an overview, or that he cared very
much. He was a party man, a functionary. Nationalism was the danger in
1989, and I warned him. The formation of popular fronts in all the republics
was definitely no coincidence. The KGB was trying to find out if there were
any organizers. Some of the popular front people obtained the posts and jobs
they wanted, but you cannot satisfy entire groups of educated people. Our
society was never a very happy one, there were shortcomings in the Soviet
Union and through nationalism you had a natural sounding board for them.
There are many things I do not like about the United States and Europe. It
confirms my suspicions when I hear Americans say that without their efforts
the Soviet Union would still be a superpower. I have grounds for knowing that
they did everything possible to destroy the Soviet Union economically and
politically... they did what was in their national interest. The country's
[USSR] foundations were badly shaken, the economy was sliding downhill,
the party had lost authority. By way of rescuing himself Gorbachev and his
team forfeited their independence' in international affairs; they did not try to
hold any position, squandering whatever had been accumulated in order to
i '
450 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rossian History
appease their Western partners. The decisive factor was the lack of political
will at the centre.
Source: quoted in David Pryce-Jones, The War That Never Was: The Fall of the Soviet Empire
1985-1991, pp. 363-5.
Notes
1. Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, p. 81.
2. Alec Nove, An Economic History o f the USSR 1917-1991, p. 399.
3. Brown, pp. 141-4.
4. Angus Roxburgh, The Second Russian Revolution, pp. 40-3.
5. Brown, p. 163.
7. Richard Sakwa, Gorbachev and his Reforms, 1985-1990, pp. 134-9.
8. Ibid., pp. 279-81.
9. Gerald Segal, ‘Ending the Cold War*, in David Armstrong and Erik Goldstein (editors),
The End o f the Cold War, p. 42.
10. Sakwa, pp. 324-5.
11. Brown, p.236.
13. Brown, p. 248.
14. Ibid., pp. 250-1.
16. David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, p. 240.
17. David Pryce-Jones, The War That Never Was. The Fall of the Soviet Empire, 1985-1991,
p. 242.
18. Martin McCauley, Gorbachev, p. 197.
19. Brown, pp. 250-1.
20. See Roxburgh, pp, 70-8 for a detailed account of this incident and the subsequent sacking
of Yeltsin.
21. McCauley, Gorbachev, p. 93. See also Roxburgh pp. 83-7 for more details of the letter and
its aftermath.
22. Remnick, pp. 220r-2.
23. Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and the Collapse o f Perestroika, pp. 94-101.
24. Brown, pp. 193-4.
25. Roxburgh, pp. 172-3.
26. Nove, p. 412.
27. Martin Walker, Dispatchesfrom the Guardian's Correspondent in Moscow, p . 4.
28. S. White, After Gorbachev, p. 127.
29. John Simpson, Despatches from the Barricades, p. 293.
30. Nove, p. 413.
31. See Ronald G. Suny, The Revenge o f the Past, for a full examination of the nationalities
problem.
32. Pryce-Jones, p. 138.
33. Brown, pp. 264-7.
34. Remnick, pp. 238-9.
35. Jonathan Steele, Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev and the Mirage o f Democracy,
pp. 206-9.
36. Brown, p. 152.
37. Ibid., p. 274.
38. Quoted in McCauley, pp. 193-4.
39. Brown, p. 292.
40. Boris Yeltsin, The View from the Kremlin, pp. 38-9.

41. Details in this section are taken mainly from the excellent account of the attempted coup
in Reqinick, Lenin's Tomb, pp. 435-90. See also Jack F. Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire:
The American Ambassador's Account o f the Collapse o f the Soviet Union, New York, 1995,
pp. 578-602.
42. Amy Knight, Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB's Successors, pp. 17-28.
43. Quoted by Jonathan Steele, ‘Mikhail Gorbachev: The Russian revolutionary', The Guard
ian, 18 August 2001.
44. Brown, p. 388.
45. McCauley, p. 248.
46. Mark Galeotti, The Age o f Anxiety. Security and Politics in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,
p. 192.
47. Simpson, p. 294.
48. John Bushnell, ‘Making History out of Current Events: The Gorbachev Era’, Slavic
Review, 51 /3 (1992), p. 557; quoted in Brown, p. 389.
50. Brown, p. 310.
51. Steele, The Guardian, 18 August 2001.
52. Dmitri Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall o f the Soviet Empire, p. 528.
53. McCauley, pp. 72,272.
55. Brown, pp. 317-18.
57. Ibid., p. 434.
59. Simpson, p. 292.
60. See especially Barry Naughton, Growing Out o f the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform
1978-1993, pp. 309-26.
61. Martin McCauley, Gorbachev, pp. 283-4.
62. Steele, The Guardian, 18 August 2001.
64. Nove, p. 419.
i v
MZ II Russia under Yeltsin, 19 9 1-9 9
Summary of events
Boris Yeltsin had been elected president of the Russian Federation in June 1991.
When the USSR broke up at the end of 1991, Russia became a separate state;
Yeltsin remained president until he retired at the end of 1999. The problems
facing him were complicated in the extreme, since the country needed both a
new economic system and a new political system.
Immediately, at the beginning of 1992, Russia was plunged into 'shock therapy*,
the policy of prime minister Yegor Gaidar. It was designed to transform the coun
try rapidly into a market economy, and included privatization of all state-owned
enterprises, and the end of price controls and government subsidies. The policy
was not a great success, causing inflation, unemployment and poverty.
Confrontation with parliament - the Supreme Soviet, led by Alexander Rutskoi

and Ruslan Khasbulatov, two former allies of Yeltsin, was bitterly critical of the
'shock therapy’ policies, and tried to reduce the powers of the president. A long
power struggle developed:
• December 1992 - Yeltsin was forced to sack Gaidar, who was replaced by
Viktor Chernomyrdin.
• April 1993 - in a referendum 58.5 per cent of the voters expressed confidence
in Yeltsin.
• September 1993 - Yeltsin dismissed the Congress of People's Deputies and the
Supreme Soviet and introduced a new constitution, giving the presidency more
powers.
• September to October - the members of parliament resisted Yeltsin and occu
pied the parliament building, the White House. Yeltsin called in the army and
blasted parliament into submission. Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were arrested.
• December 1993 - the new constitution was approved in a referendum, but in
the following elections for the Duma, the new lower house of parliament, the
party endorsed by Yeltsin came only a poor second to the communists.
After the confrontation, Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin introduced more moderate

economic policies, but there was still little improvement in living standards for
the vast majority of the population. A small number of people, mainly former
communist party apparatchiks, made huge profits from privatization. The war in
Russia under Yeltsin 453

Chechnya (1994-96) brought Yeltsin’s popularity ratings to a low point; although
a ceasefire was arranged, the Chechen separatists were not defeated.
July 1996 - Yeltsin was elected for a second term as president. Although opinion
polls were not promising for Yteltsin to begin with, he fought a good campaign
and narrowly beat his nearest rival, the communist leader Gennady Zyuganov.
August 1998 - Financial collapse - continuing economic problems, together

with a world-wide financial crisis and a collapse in the world price of oil, led to
a devaluation of the rouble. Yeltsin appointed Yevgeny Primakov as prime min
ister, and the situation slowly began to stabilize. However, in March 1999 Yeltsin
dismissed Primakov, and with an eye to his successor as the next president, he
eventually appointed Vladimir Putin as prime minister. Yeltsin resigned on
31 December 1999 and in March 2000 Putin was elected president.
• Why was the transition to a market economy so difficult?

• Was it inevitable that the confrontation between Yeltsin and parliament
would end in violence?
• How did Yeltsin succeed in staying in power for so long, given generally
low popularity ratings?
• Why was Primakov dismissed when his policies were beginning to improve
the economic situation? \
11. 1 Economic catastrophe and

political crisis, 1992-93 v
(a) Yeltsin, Gaidar and 'shock therapy*
The USSR ceased to exist at midnight on 31 December 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev
was out of a job and Boris Yeltsin was left as the most powerful figure in Russia. It
was the most amazing come-back in Russian history; in November 1987 every
body thought his political career was over (see section 10.4(a)), but the tables had
been turned emphatically and now it was Gorbachev who was finished. Boris
Yeltsin was born in 1931 in the Sverdlovsk district of the Urals. His family were
peasants; his father, hard-working and successful, was arrested as a kulak in 1934
and sentenced to three years’ forced labour. As a boy, the young Boris was dar
ing, adventurous and always in trouble; he never seemed to worry about keeping
to the rules; and he carried these qualities forward into his political career. As a
young man, he was tall and athletic, and a first-rate volley-ball player. He trained
as a civil engineer and worked in the building industry; after a few years he tired
of this and in 1968 he joined the party apparatus. By 1976 he had risen to become
first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Province Committee and in 1981 he became
a member of the Central Committee. His reputation for energy, enthusiasm and
t V
the ability to get things done soon became widely known, and Gorbachev
brought him to Moscow as first secretary of the city committee. His brief was to
clean up the corrupt city administration.
In January 1992 his challenge as president of the Russian republic was even
more daunting: it was to clean up the mess left behind by the sudden collapse of
the USSR. There were both political and economic decisions to be made. Given
that this was a completely new political situation, should fresh elections be held
so that Yeltsin could claim a mandate for whatever policies he decided to intro
duce? Or should the government press ahead with economic reforms and seek
the electorate's approval later? Predictably he chose the second option; an election
would cause several weeks' delay, and he was impatient to make a start on eco
nomic reform, which would best be handled, he had decided, by presidential
decree. The disadvantage of this choice was that the Russian Congress of People's
Deputies and the Supreme Soviet, alongside which he would have to work, had
been elected in 1990; a large proportion of the members were likely to oppose his
policies. The second question to be decided was exactly what economic policies
should be introduced. The experts agreed that Russia should change to a full,
market economy, with 'liberalization of prices’ and privatization; but they dis
agreed as to whether this should be done gradually over a period of some years,
or whether it should be attempted rapidly - the ‘big bang', the 'cavalry charge’
and 'shock therapy' were some of the phrases used to describe this method.
Yegor Gaidar was a young economist who, since 1990, had been head of the
economics section of Pravda and who was influenced by the theories of the
Western monetarists. Yeltsin was attracted by Gaidar’s insistence that the necessary
changes could be achieved in one year, whereas the other economists varied in
their predictions from three years to ten. The key, according to Gaidar, was ‘price
liberalization', which would set the scene for the privatization of almost the
whole economy. Yeltsin made Gaidar a vice-president and gave him the job of
carrying through the economic changes (Document A). They gathered around
them a small team of relatively young economists (in their late thirties and
forties) who shared Gaidar's views; the older politicians looked on them with
contempt, considering them to be still wet behind the ears. Vice-president
Rutskoi (aged 55) dismissed them as 'young boys in pink shorts and yellow boots’
(Gaidar was 46 in 1992!). They admitted that things would be difficult at first,
since they were about to administer 'shock therapy’. Yeltsin himself said: 'Things
will get worse for everyone for about half a year, then there will come a lowering
of prices, and the filling up of the consumer market with goods. By the autumn of
1992 there will be stabilization of the economy, and a gradual improvement in
people's lives.’ They had a political motive too - they hoped their policies would
destroy the old communist bureaucracy or at least weaken it so much that there
could never be a return to the old system.
The therapy began on 2 January 1992 when price controls were removed on
about 90 per cent of goods, though excluding bread, vodka, public transport and
energy. Government subsidies to industry were ended, and enterprises were
expected to compete in the marketplace and make a profit. This, it was con
fidently expected, would help to reduce Russia's huge budget deficit. Freed from
restrictions and allowed to ‘float freely’, prices rose quickly. By the end of January

they had shot up by 250 per cent; by the end of March 1992 they had increased by
as much as 900 per cent for most goods and services, although average wages
only doubled during that period.1 Something like this had been predicted, but
unfortunately it went on for longer than half a year; prices kept on rising
throughout 1992, so that by the end of the year even the lowest estimate was that
prices were, on average, 30 times higher than on 1 January (Document B). There
were plenty of goods in the shops, but most people could not afford to buy them.
For the vast majority, the situation was catastrophic: pensioners were worst affec
ted and had difficulty surviving; even those in jobs were not always paid their
wages, since factories were selling less and producing less; over a million people
lost their jobs. Some enterprises began paying wages in goods - crockery, vodka,
sweets and chocolate, coal, and even refrigerators. For months, streets and squares
in central Moscow were blocked with crowds of people selling off their posses
sion to make ends meet. From July onwards the situation worsened because the
government, itself short of money, was forced to spend less on social services;
health care and education suffered worst. People living on accumulated savings
were badly hit, since the headlong inflation wiped out their value. Hundreds
were made homeless; railway stations became favourite places for the homeless
to use as hostels; villages of tents sprang up outside most towns. Collective farmers
and workers were able to cope better than most, thanks to their private plots.
The removal of price controls was only the first step in the transition to a mar
ket economy. The next phase was the privatization of state property - factories,
mines and collective farms were all to be turned into independent joint-stock
companies, and the process was to be directed by Anatoly Chubais. There was
opposition from the Supreme Soviet, some of whose members had been lobbied
and pressurized by the directors and managers of some of the big state industries,
who wanted state subsidies to be resumed. It was only when Chubais comprom
ised by allowing state subsidies to continue, that the Supreme Soviet approved
his programme in June 1992. At first it seemed as though the intention was for all
these concerns to be turned over to the joint ownership of all the people.
Chubais introduced a system of vouchers which were supposed to give every
citizen an equal share of state property - each worth 10,000 roubles (about £35 at
the time they were issued). There were also plans for workers to be able to buy
shares in their enterprise. If the intention was to create a sort of capitalism of the
people, it failed; 10,000 roubles was a minute amount at a time of rapid inflation;
what happened was that in most cases the managers were able to accumulate
enough vouchers and shares to take over the ownership of their plant (Document C).
This was a great disappointment for the workers, who had even less influence
than before on what happened in their workplace. Yet surprisingly, there were
very few strikes; perhaps workers were too stunned by the difficulties they had
experienced over the previous year to organize protests.2
The Supreme Soviet, however, had no intention of letting Gaidar and Chubais
continue without opposition. The government's popularity had dwindled steadily,
and although most people seemed to blame Gaidar for the chaos, even Yeltsin's
massive support was wearing thin. People were disillusioned with politics and
politicians. Two of Yeltsin's former supporters became leaders of the opposition
in the Supreme Soviet: Alexander Rutskoi, the Vice-president, who had stood by
»
Yeltsin during the August coup» and Ruslan Khasbulatov, whom Yeltsin had
chosen as speaker of the Supreme Soviet. They demanded price controls» more
gradual progress towards privatization and more protection for ordinary citizens.
Already in the summer of 1992 their protests had forced Yeltsin to make a con
cession by bringing into the government Viktor Chernomyrdin» an expert on the
energy industry. In December there was a great showdown when the Supreme
Soviet tried to reduce Yeltsin's powers, but in the end, a compromise was
reached: Yeltsin agreed to replace Gaidar with Chernomyrdin; in return the
Supreme Soviet agreed to a referendum to test the popularity of Yeltsin's
policies. In January 1993 Chernomyrdin introduced controls on prices and on
the profits that could be made on certain goods. The opposition seemed to think
this was a great victory; however, the situation continued to deteriorate throughout
1993. Industrial production fell by a further 25 per cent during the year, and
the rate of exchange worsened: at the end of 1992 it had been 450 roubles to the
dollar; at the end of 1993 it was 1250 to the dollar. A report published by the eco
nomics division of the Russian Academy of Sciences at the end of 1993, summing
up the first two years of ‘shock therapy', revealed that no less than one-third of
the entire population had incomes so pathetically small that they were below the
official subsistence level. Ten per cent of the population, which amounted to
about 15 million people, were below the level considered necessary for physical
survival. The report came to the grim conclusion that ‘a process of marginaliza
tion is going on in the population. The number of beggars, homeless people,
alcoholics, drug addicts and prostitutes is growing... Our country has been
thrown back two centuries to the “savage era” of capitalism.'3
(b) Why did ‘shock therapy9not work?

One of the main problems was that the privatization programme did not work
out as intended. The fact that government subsidies continued to be paid to big
enterprises meant that they were not really responding to market forces; the gov
ernment continued to pay out huge sums of money, whereas one of the aims of
the programme had been to reduce the budget deficit. Instead of being jointly
owned by the people, by the end of 1995, most of the former state industry had
found its way into the hands of a relatively small group of financiers, who became
known as the ‘oligarchs'; even Yeltsin admits in his memoirs that they had been
acquired at ‘bargain-basement prices.' They made enormous profits, but from
the government subsidies rather than from the market. Instead of reinvesting
their profits in Russian industry, which was the government's intention, they
transferred them to Swiss bank accounts and foreign investments; total invest
ment in Russia fell by two-thirds. Chernomyrdin, who was in effect the head of
Russia's energy industry, resisted the shift to energy prices on the world market,
and supplied gas and oil to Russian industry at a fraction of the world price. But
industry did not always benefit from this advantage: middlemen bought up
much of the oil at the knock-down domestic price, and sold it abroad at the
world price, which was often up to 100 times more than they had paid for it.
A similar thing happened with subsidized grain. At every level of economic activity
there were people willing to take advantage of the fact that the move to the market

economy was a 'leap in the dark', that there were no politicians or economists in
Russia whp were experienced in this sort of manoeuvre, and that there would be
mistakes and loopholes to be exploited. Sadly, corruption, fraud, bribery and
criminal activity became part of everyday life in Russia. A report given to Yeltsin
in January 1994 claimed that criminal mafias had gained control in some form or
other over between 70 and 80 per cent of all business and banking. The man who
had cleaned up Moscow in 1985-87 now presided over the largest corruption
scandal ever seen in Russia.
To be fair to Yeltsin and his government, the unfortunate legacy of communism
made their task extremely difficult (see section 10.6(c)). There had been no capit
alism and no market in Russia for over 70 years. The Russians had no experience
of a competitive environment; no legal standards for market relations had been
adopted, and even after the first two years of ‘shock treatment’, very few market
institutions had been created. In this situation, it was extremely rash to attempt
a ‘cavalry charge’ into a full market economy. Other options were available and
several were suggested to Yeltsin; these included a programme of privatizing some
large state-owned enterprises, the gradual creation of a competitive environment,
and a return to private ownership in small and medium-sized workshops and
factories, in trade and in service industries. A determined campaign to encourage
Western investment in Russia was vital. And according to Roy Medvedev, ‘partial
liberalization of foreign trade, joint ventures and jointly owned companies,
banks and stock markets, and other elements of a market-oriented infrastructure
would all be steps in the right direction.’4 Another weakness which helped to
spoil Gaidar's chances of success was the fact that he was trying to introduce
fundamental changes into an economy which was already in serious crisis. For
over 40 years the USSR had strained every sinew to maintain military parity with
an economically more powerful opponent, and this was bound to lead to disaster
in the end. It was no coincidence that the world’s two most successful economies
after 1945 were those of Germany and Japan, the two states which, following
their defeat in the Second World War, were restricted from having lar£e armies
and major armaments. In Russia the shift from a massive defence industry to
a civilian programme could not be carried out in just a few months; it needed
continued government planning and guidance.
The reformers were trying to switch Russia over, in a few months, to a system
of advanced capitalism which had taken centuries to develop naturally in the
West. Western capitalism is based on massive accumulations of capital which
Russia does not have. Gaidar and his associates expected financial help from the
West, but none was forthcoming; the West even refused to drop the trade barriers
put in place during the 1970s because of human rights violations by the Soviet
government. However, Russia removed virtually all its trade barriers against
Western imports, with the result that Western companies were able to establish
themselves in Russia and could undersell many of Russia’s own manufactured
goods. Russian industry was so inefficient that it could not compete when it was
exposed to market conditions. In a sense there was a vicious circle; after the first
weeks of ‘shock therapy', as soon as people began to feel its bad effects on them
selves, they stopped supporting and co-operating with the government. Most
people had been attracted to the movement for democracy by considerations of
I V
social justice, freedom and civil rights, not by a burning desire for market reform
and capitalism. Chubais did not endear himself to the general public when he
declared that social inequality was inevitable in any society, and even desirable;
‘you cannot expect everyone to live a comfortable, pleasant life' (Document D).
(c) The political crisis and ‘civil war* in Moscow

The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union had left the political scene in the
Russian republic in a state of flux. The leading politicians talked about democ
racy, but in the same way that they lacked experience of the market economy,
they also had very little idea of how to operate a democratic system. There were
no properly organized political parties on the Western model. The constitution
was a leftover from the Soviet era; it had been changed so many times that
nobody seemed entirely sure what state it had reached. Its main weakness was
that it was unclear about the division of powers between the president and the
parliament - the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet. According
to Ronald Suny, ‘Yeltsin neglected to form his own political party, which might
have given his government an institutional base of support... Though embry
onic parties had emerged in the last years of the Soviet Union, they were largely
elite organizations, often clustered around particular leaders, with unreliable
popular support Without elections they withered away in the first years of the
independent Russian republic. Instead of popular parties, powerful interest
groups imbedded in the new economy made their own ad hoc arrangements
with state authorities to their own mutual benefit. Politics moved from the street
and the electoral arena into the hallways of the bureaucracy and the backrooms
of the presidential apparatus.'5
Yeltsin himself came under heavy criticism from some sections of the press
which accused him of behaving like the very type of communist party boss which
he had criticized so bitterly before 1991, appointing his friends and supporters to
all the top positions and operating a kind of ‘Sverdlovsk Mafia'. He admits in his
memoirs that he had his own chauffeur-driven limousine, he founded his own
select tennis club, and hardly ever mixed with other politicians.6But although his
position seemed to be under threat, he was more secure than he seemed. Polit
ical parties were beginning to take shape by the end of 1992, but there were too
many of them and they were too loosely organized to present a serious threat. At
that point the two most important ones seemed to be the Liberal-Democratic
Party led by Vladimir Zhirinovski, which was, in fact, a radical Russian nationalist
party; and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (legalized again since
November 1992) under the leadership of Gennady Zyuganov. Parliament pre
sented the most serious challenge to Yeltsin, but it was no more popular with the
general public than the president himself. By March 1993 it was three years since
the Congress of People’s Deputies had been elected, when about 80 per cent of
the deputies were communist party members; although they now presented
themselves under different labels, many people still saw them as the relics of the
corrupt nomenklatura of the Soviet period. In fact there was a wide range of
opinion in the Supreme Soviet chosen by the Congress, right through from con
servative hard-line communists to those who wanted Western-style democracy.

There seemed a chance that the power struggle between Yeltsin and parliament
might be ^resolved in April 1993, when the referendum agreed the previous
December was due to be held. Fearing that the referendum would result in an
endorsement of Yeltsin’s policies and a defeat for themselves, Khasbulatov and
Rutskoi, the leaders of the Supreme Soviet, announced that it had been cancelled.
Yeltsin responded on 20 March by going on television and declaring that he had
placed Russia under 'special administrative rule;’ parliament was subordinate to
the rule of the president, and would not have the power to cancel his decrees.
The Constitutional Court ruled that Yeltsin’s action was unconstitutional, and
parliament began to discuss the impeachment of the president. Tensions were
high: on 28 March there was a huge demonstration of 100,000 Yeltsin supporters
on Red Square. The following day the Congress voted on impeachment; the
result was 617 for Yeltsin’s dismissal, and 268 against. It was a huge defeat for the
president, but not quite enough to secure his dismissal; the constitution
demanded that three-quarters of the members needed to vote for dismissal - that
is, 780 votes. Yeltsin proclaimed victory, but was shrewd enough to compromise:
he agreed to drop his 'special rule’ decree and parliament promised to allow the
referendum to go ahead. Yeltsin had got his way - again.
The referendum was held on 25 April 1993. The two main questions were: do
you have confidence in the president, Boris Yeltsin? and do you approve of the
social and economic policies carried out by the president since 1992? The results
were a victory for Yeltsin who gained ‘yes’ votes of 58.5 per cent and 53 per cent
Some observers expressed surprise at Yeltsin’s success, given the hardships his
policies were causing to so many people; but clearly they had even less con
fidence in the alternatives to Yeltsin. A closer analysis of the voting suggested
that Yeltsin had no cause for complacency; although he had massive support in
Moscow, St Petersburg, the Urals region and the east, parliament was more popu
lar in the Volga region, in central Russia and in the non-Russian autonomous
republics. The political situation had reached stalemate: Yeltsin was determined
to press ahead with further measures leading to a market economy, and parliament
was equally determined to prevent him.
Predictably, it was Yeltsin who made the most decisive moves to break out of
the impasse. He began planning a campaign to get rid of parliament; he had a
new constitution drawn up which would make parliament and the bureaucracy
subordinate to the president, and he had talks with army leaders. On 18 September
1993 he brought back Gaidar as first deputy prime minister, a sure sign that he
intended to go all-out towards a market economy. Moscow was rife with rumours
that he was planning to occupy the White House, the Supreme Soviet building,
with troops, thus locking out the members. His actions at this time were so
blatant that he may have been deliberately trying to provoke parliament into
making the first hostile move, so that he would have an excuse to crush them.7
On 21 September at 8 pm Yeltsin appeared on all television channels to
announce his Decree No. 1400. This stated that the powers of the Congress
of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet were annulled, and a new dual-
chambered assembly would take their place. Anew constitution would be presented
on 12 December, and elections held for the new assembly. Until then the country
was to be governed by decrees of the president. Parliament had no intention of
I V
allowing itself to be killed off in this peremptory way; the showdown was about
to begin.8 Khasbulatov and Rutskoi rushed to the White House where they were
joined by hundreds of deputies, journalists and supporters, including General
Makashov and a group of other generals who wanted to bring Yeltsin down. They
barricaded themselves in and announced that Yeltsin's action was a breach of
the constitution; they cited a clause which stated that in the event of an attempt
by the president to disperse a legally elected body, his powers would automatically
cease to exist. Yeltsin’s actions were to be regarded as a coup d'état, and therefore
vice-president Rutskoi was now acting president. In a strange reversal of the
situation in August 1991, Yeltsin ordered the army to surround the White House.
Although they complied, the generals made it clear to Yeltsin that they were not
happy about attacking the White House and dispersing the deputies; they were
reluctant to shed Russian blood. The television system sided with Yeltsin, which
was a great advantage, but the press was either neutral or supported the
Supreme Soviet. The ordinary people of Moscow showed much less interest than
in 1991; a poll showed that 75 per cent sympathized with neither side, and there
was no large-scale street support for the parliament.
The stand-off lasted from 21 September until 3 October. For the first few days it
was relatively easy to enter and leave the White House, but gradually Yeltsin
turned up the pressure; more troops were moved in, and late in the evening of 24
September, the electricity was turned off; by the 28th the water supply and
telephones were cut off, and police and troops sealed the building off com
pletely. On Sunday 3 October, events took a strange turn: a large demonstration
of Supreme Soviet supporters pushed their way through the cordon of troops
surrounding the White House and broke the blockade. The soldiers made only
half-hearted attempts to prevent them; in fact most of the troops and police
seemed to have disappeared. Encouraged by this into believing that the troops
had come over to the side of parliament, General Makashov and Rutskoi led
a group of some two thousand supporters out of the White House and stormed
the headquarters of the Mayor of Moscow. This was occupied without any resist
ance, and the force moved on to their next target - the Ostankino television
centre. However, as the demonstrators tried to force a way in, troops opened fire,
and dozens of people fell dead and wounded. The attack was beaten off with
heavy casualties. This was the signal for Yeltsin to take the White House by force;
it was announced that an armed insurrection was taking place against the gov
ernment; early the following morning, 4 October, armoured units opened fire on
the defenders of the parliament building. Although there was hardly any return
fire, the attack continued until about 9 am, when Rutskoi signalled that they were
ready to surrender. The offer was ignored and firing was directed at the building
itself until it began to bum. At about 11 am the first troops entered the White
House and soon people began to stream out with their hands up. Khasbulatov
and Rutskoi were arrested, along with other leading deputies; none of them was
shot but many were severely beaten up by police.
Official estimates put the death toll at about 200, with between 700 and 800
wounded. Why the situation suddenly exploded on 3 October remains some
thing of a mystery; Roy Medvedev argues that the leaders of parliament fell into
a trap prepared for them by Yeltsin. It was important for him to be able to claim

that he was acting in self-defence. ‘As long as the supporters of parliament were
only defending the building and upholding the constitution, Yeltsin had no valid
justification for storming the Supreme Soviet building. To have a parliament that
defended itself and perished under a hail of bullets was not to his advantage. On
the other hand, an armed uprising, a putsch by the opposition forces benefited
him politically.' The police and troops were ordered to withdraw so as to lure the
defenders of parliament into making ‘an insane show of force.' They had given
Yeltsin his excuse to attack the White House.9 The violent action of the ‘October
Events' divided Russian opinion sharply; Yeltsin supporters claimed that it had
been necessary to crush once and for all the remnants of Soviet Communism
which wanted to take Russia back to the bad old Stalinist days. Rut many of
Yeltsin's genuinely democratic supporters were appalled by the attack on the
White House; some of them abandoned him and some joined the opposition.
The supporters of parliament regarded Yeltsin's actions as a criminal breach of
the constitution and accused him of establishing an authoritarian dictatorship
instead of the democratic system he had promised.
The promised referendum on the new draft constitution was due to take place
on 12 December and the elections for the new Federal Assembly on 15 December.
This was to consist of two chambers: the first was the State Duma, of which half
the 450 members were elected in constituencies and half by proportional rep
resentation from national party lists. The second chamber, the Council of the
Federation, was to consist of two representatives from each of the various auto
nomous republics and provinces within the Russian republic. The president was
to have considerable say in who was appointed to the second chamber. In the
referendum the voters approved Yeltsin's new constitution, though only by
a narrow majority. There was still a large number of political parties, and during
the campaign for the State Duma elections they formed blocs. Yeltsin, still
without a specific party of his own, endorsed Gaidar's party, ‘Russia’s Choice’,
which formed a pact with Sergei Shakhrai's Party of Russian Unity and Concord.
They favoured a continuation of drastic economic reforms and the rapid move
towards a market economy, and expected to win, so they claimed, around 50 per
cent of the seats between them. On the left was a bloc consisting of Zyuganov's
Communist Party, the Agrarian Party and the Women of Russià. On the right was
a bloc calling itself Yabloko (Apple) headed by Grigory Yavlinsky, which wanted
a more cautious economic policy and the continuation of subsidies for state-
owned industries. The only party not to join a bloc was Zhirinovski’s Liberal-
Democrat Party. The election results were a surprise to everybody and were
a clear rebuff to Yeltsin. Gaidar’s party won only 14 per cent of the popular vote,
and even with their allies they could muster barely 25 per cent, giving them less
than half the number of seats they had hoped for. The Communists and their
allies won about 25 per cent, and Zhirinovsky's Liberal-Democrats received
22 per cent of the votes. The final results in terms of seats gave Gaidar’s party only
70 seats, whereas the Communist bloc had 103 and the Liberal-Democrats 64.
Zhirinovsky's success disgusted most of the other political leaders, since he
was seen as the worst ,type of vulgar, nationalist demagogue; in his television
appearances he had talked about restoring the Russian empire, expanding to the
Indian Ocean and taking Alaska back from the USA. But he touched a chord with
i \
ordinary people when he promised to do something about poverty and the col
lapse of the social service safety net. Yeltsin had clearly failed to deliver on his
promises; prices for basic consumer goods were five times higher in December
1993 than they had been in April, and although wages and pensions increased
too, they only rose by about three per cent. The results of the election were
a great disappointment for Yeltsin and his supporters, but in practice, his power
was not affected; the new constitution allowed him to appoint his own prime
minister, to conduct foreign policy, and to dismiss parliament and rule by decree
if he felt like it. Such was Russian democracy at the end of 1993.
11.2 The end of ‘market romanticism*

(a) Yeltsin attem pts to govern by consent
Soon after the elections of December 1993, prime minister Chernomyrdin
announced: ‘the period of “market romanticism” has ended for us today.’ He
meant, apparently, that since the ‘cavalry charge' towards a market economy had
been something of a senseless dream, more moderate policies would be followed.
The goal was the same, but the approach was to be more gradual. Gaidar and
several other ministers resigned, and eventually only one person remained in the
cabinet from Gaidar’s team - Anatoly Chubais, who was still in charge of the
privatization process. As for the president himself, although the new constitution
gave him great power, he wanted to avoid confrontation with the new Duma and
he knew that he could not afford to ignore public opinion completely. The next
presidential election was due in the summer of 1996; and apart from that, given
that Russian politics were still in a state of flux, there was always the danger that
he might be overthrown by an insurrection. The new leaders in the Duma
seemed much less confrontational than his previous opponents, Khasbulatov
and Rutskoi. When Yeltsin proposed that they should sign an agreement to abide
by the constitution and not resort to violence, almost all the leaders complied. In
July 1994 the Duma approved Chernomyrdin's new budget designed to stop the
decline of production and move into a period of growth. Yeltsin seemed to be
keeping a low profile and trying to remain above party squabbles.
Now that Gaidar and the radical reformers had been discredited, the two most
vociferous parties were Zyuganov’s Communists and Zhirinovsky's Nationalists.
Surprisingly perhaps, they agreed on several important points: they were both
anti-Western and believed that Russia had been taken advantage of by the USA
since Gorbachev came to power in 1985. They disapproved strongly of Yeltsin's
pro-Western Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, who wanted Russia to work
closely with Europe and NATO. They both advocated the reuniting of the former
republics of the USSR into a new multi-national state. They wanted to stop privat
ization and return to state control of the economy, with government subsidies
for the main industries. They wanted more emphasis on law and order and felt it
was time to restore national pride. Although Zyuganov was a communist and
claimed to hold Lenin sacred, unlike Lenin and Stalin he was not an atheist; he
believed that socialist ideas and values are very close to Christian values and he

has great respect for the Orthodox Church. Yeltsin listened to what they were
saying, and as far as possible, he took on board their ideas. For instance, he
began to echo their anti-Western sentiments, criticizing NATO and expressing
support for the Serbs during the civil war in Yugoslavia.
However, on economic matters Yeltsin remained committed to Chernomyr
din's policies and to continuing privatization. By the end of 1995 the government
had sold or otherwise transferred into private hands about 80 per cent of all
enterprises previously owned by the state. Yet the treasury seemed to benefit
very little from these sales; most of the enterprises, even those that were pro
fitable and valuable, were sold off at well below what they were worth. In spite of
constant protests, this process continued through 1995; the feeling among ordin
ary Russians was that shady deals were being done, and many officials were
pocketing considerable amounts of money. A new wealthy property-owning
class was being created which included the former managers of state-owned
industries, politicians, government officials, entrepreneurs and bankers. Many
officials took advantage of their positions and inside knowledge to make lucra
tive ‘arrangements', and it was difficult to know where the line came between
legitimate and criminal activities (Document E). Strangely, Yeltsin, who had once
been the scourge of corrupt officials in Moscow, seemed to do very little to
restrain or discipline his underlings, nor did he appear especially worried by the
generally increasing crime rate.10 Observers noted that in the countryside just
outside Moscow, hundreds of luxurious houses, even small palaces, were being
built. But for most people there was no obvious sign of improvement; prices
continued to rise throughout 1995, and by the end of the year they had more or
less doubled since January. The number of people living in poverty continued to
grow, unemployment increased, the death rate increased, and the birth rate
declined. Nor had the situation been helped by the outbreak of war with the
Chechen republic in December 1994.
(b) Conflict in Chechnya, 1994-96

The Chechens are an Islamic people numbering about one million, who live in
the Northern Caucasus to the north of Georgia, inside the borders of the Russian
republic. They were never happy under Russian rule, and resistance movements
were active from the mid-nineteenth century. They resisted communist rule
during the early years and the civil war, and they resisted Stalin's collectiviza
tion drive. During the Second World War Stalin accused them of collaborating
with the Germans, and the entire nation was brutally deported to Central Asia;
thousands died on the journey. In 1956 Khrushchev allowed the Chechens to
return to their homeland, and their autonomous republic was restored. In the
late 1980s Yeltsin, on the look-out for ways of attracting the support of non-
Russian peoples in his struggle with Gorbachev, began to encourage their
leaders to assert their sovereignty. In a policy which he bitterly regretted later,
he seemed to be inciting all non-Russians to declare independence from the
USSR and gave the impression that the Russian republic would support such
moves. The Chechens needed little encouragement; according to Ronald Suny:
‘at the time of the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, a flamboyant officer, Jokhar
»V
Dudaev, was elected by a council of elders as leader of Chechnya, and with
a small band of armed men, he took power from the local party boss... After
being elected President of the Chechen Republic, in dubious elections, Dudaev
defied Russian authority and allowed his republic to become a centre for free
wheeling economic and criminal activity/11
When the USSR broke up, Chechnya proclaimed itself an independent republic,
as did four other states - Dniester, Abkhazia, Karabakh, and Southern Ossetia.
However, none of them received international recognition. Yeltsin managed to
persuade the other four states, along with the rest of the autonomous republics,
to remain in the Russian Federation; in 1992 they all signed a new Federation
Treaty. This was a considerable achievement for Yeltsin, but the Russian nation
alists were not impressed - they wanted a unitary state in which all parts were
completely under the authority of Moscow. Only Chechnya refused to sign.
Having failed to persuade Dudaev to co-operate, Yeltsin tried to engineer his
overthrow from within, using agents to stir Dudaev’s enemies into action. When
that ploy failed, Yeltsin and his advisers decided to use military force to bring the
Chechens back into the fold. The reasons given were that their illegal separatism
must be brought to an end, and that Chechnya was being used as a base from
which criminal gangs were operating throughout Russia. The decision to attack
Chechnya was taken without consulting the Federal Assembly or testing public
opinion. When the news came out, the Duma voted overwhelmingly against
military action; even some senior army leaders like General Lebed expressed ser
ious doubts about the wisdom of such a policy. There were rumours that the real
reason for the invasion was that some ministers had been involved in deals with
criminal gangs in Chechnya; the deals had not been honoured by the Chechens,
and the Russian attack was therefore a revenge operation.
Whatever the truth behind the rumours, on 11 December 1994, forty thousand
Russian troops invaded Chechnya. The government did not expect much resistance,
but there was fierce fighting before the Chechen capital, Grozny, was captured in
February 1995. All round the world television viewers saw shocking images of
Russian tanks rolling through the ruined city. But the Chechens would not sur
render. Thousands of refugees fled into the hills; guerrilla forces were organized
which continually harassed the Russians, who were not trained to deal with such
tactics. Guerrillas attacked Russian troops over the border in southern Russia
and threatened to start a terrorist bombing campaign in Moscow. The Russian
soldiers grew discouraged; they knew that the general public did not support the
war and that even their own commanders were less than enthusiastic; casualty
figures grew alarmingly. In the summer of 1996 the Chechens succeeded in
recapturing Grozny from the demoralized Russians, who by this time had lost
almost twenty thousand of their troops killed. Yeltsin was preoccupied by the
presidential election campaign; realizing that the fiasco in Chechnya was ruining
his reputation, he promised to end the war and he appointed General Lebed with
full powers to open peace negotiations. Lebed was a popular figure who some
how persuaded the Chechens to compromise, though it took some time: eventu
ally the Russians agreed to withdraw their troops and the Chechens agreed to set
up a coalition government acceptable to Moscow; they did not drop their
demands for complete independence, but there was to be a cooling-off period of

five years, after which the status of Chechnya would be considered again. Sadly,
the fighting started again long before that.
(c) More elections, December 1995-July 1996

The strains of office were beginning to tell on Yeltsin; he was especially stressed
by the conflict in Chechnya, and in June 1995 he suffered a heart-attack. Yet he
seemed to have no thoughts of retirement; he simply left the day-to-day running
of affairs to prime minister Chernomyrdin. The government was so unpopular
that many people thought the Duma elections due in December might be
cancelled. Nevertheless, it was announced that they would go ahead as provided
for in the new constitution - Duma elections in December 1995 and presidential
elections in June 1996. From the early summer of 1995 the political parties and
groupings began preparing and lining themselves up for the December elections,
which were seen as a dress-rehearsal for the following June. His advisers
persuaded Yeltsin that he ought to have a political party to back him - a ‘party of
power'. Obligingly, Chernomyrdin founded a party which took the name ‘Our
Home is Russia’ {Nash Dom Rossiya, or NDR for short); it had a three-point
programme: ‘a strong state, liberal foundations for the economic life of Russia,
and appreciable social measures’. The new party tried to convince the electorate
that the government's economic policies were beginning to work, and there is
some evidence of truth in this; at least the inflation rate was falling and so was
the budget deficit.
The election results were disappointing for the government; they had run a
lavish campaign for the new NDR, buying over seven hours of advertising-time
on television; but they won only 65 out of the 450 seats in the Duma. Yet they
ought not to have been surprised; opinion polls had not been promising and
there was a general air of discontent in the country. Gennady Zyuganov’s
Communist Party did best, even though they only bought six minutes of televi
sion advertising time! They won 157 seats, and together with their allies, they
could muster 186 seats in the Duma, by far the largest grouping. Clearly there
was a great deal of residual support and nostalgia for the old days of the USSR
and strong communist government. Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democrats did less
well than in 1993, winning only 52 seats. In terms of percentages, the votes of the
groups that supported Yeltsin and the government added up to about 25 per
cent, the communists and allies had 32 per cent, and the rest were divided
among a variety of groups. Although the communists lacked the controlling vote,
they were obviously the preponderant party; a communist was elected chairman
of the Duma, and many of the committees were headed by communists.12 The
government party had come a very poor second. In a genuinely democratic sys
tem the communists would have taken a leading role in the next administration;
in Russia, nothing much changed - Yeltsin remained president, at least until the
following June, and Chernomyrdin was still prime minister. However, Yeltsin did
replace his pro-Western Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, with Yevgeny Primakov,
who was much more of a nationalist.
Almost immediately the politicians began to prepare for the presidential
elections; Yeltsin was determined to stand, in spite of his heart problems and the
I V
Figure 11.1 Yeltsin meets the public during the June 1996 election campaign.
fact that opinion polls gave him a popularity rating of less than five per cent. It
seemed inconceivable that Yeltsin could win; some of his advisers wanted him to
cancel the elections, and even resort to force if necessary to stay in power. To his
credit Yeltsin allowed the election to go ahead and over 20 candidates registered
to run in the first round, which was to take place on 16 June 1996. It was soon
clear that the communist leader, Zyuganov, would be his greatest rival, although
the candidates also included Lebed, Zhirinovsky, Yavlinsky and Gorbachev. Early
opinion polls put Zyuganov as the likely winner; this caused consternation in the
West at the prospect of a return to communism and the Cold War. However,
Yeltsin's supporters rallied well, and he threw himself enthusiastically into the
campaign. He seemed to have gained new energy; he toured the country, visiting
24 different regions and cities, promising everything to everybody. Wage arrears
would be paid to workers, pensions were to be raised, there were to be schol
arships for students and compensation payments for savings wiped out by infla
tion. It was announced that hundreds of millions of extra roubles were to be
spent on science, education, hospitals and theatres. The unpopular privatization
programme was stopped, and its mastermind, the now universally detested
Anatoly Chubais, resigned. In April an agreement was signed for the formation of
a union between Belarus and Russia. Yeltsin promised peace in Chechnya and
met Chechen leaders in the Kremlin, where a cease-fire was signed. Zyuganov
protested: ‘Look at Yeltsin's decrees. Why, he is carrying out 80 per cent of our
programme.'
The communists had some distinctive policies: Zyuganov continued his anti-
Western stance, and laid great emphasis on the communists' concern with social
welfare. He advocated policies like those followed by the Chinese, encouraging

the manufacture of consumer goods and keeping fuel prices low. Like Yeltsin, he
too campaigned vigorously, travelling around the country and drawing large
audiences. But he had one big disadvantage: apart from the fact that he lacked
any sort of charisma, he failed to distance himself sufficiently from Stalin, whom
he often referred to and quoted. This was a great mistake; one Moscow university
professor who was sympathetic to the new communist party was reported as
saying: ‘How could I vote for Zyuganov? I was at one of his demonstrations, and
there were thousands of people marching along and carrying portraits of Zyuganov
and Stalin' In the first round of voting Yeltsin won a narrow victory with 35 per
cent of the votes against 32 per cent for Zyuganov and 15 per cent for Lebed,
whose slogan was ‘justice and order'. All the other candidates performed disap
pointingly, and none more so than Gorbachev who received barely one per cent
of the votes. Only the first two candidates went forward to the second ballot on
3 July. Yeltsin’s health was giving cause for concern again, and at some point
during the campaign he suffered another heart-attack. He admits in his memoirs
that his advisers decided to deal with this by holding back information, and no
details of the illness appeared until after he had been re-elected. His team used
all their massive political experience in the intervening couple of weeks to win
over the votes from the other candidates. They especially targeted the people
who had voted for Lebed; on 18 June Yeltsin appointed Lebed as secretary of the
Russian Security Council, and he dropped several hints that he was beginning to
look on Lebed as his chosen successor. The ploy was successful: in the second
ballot Yeltsin won a comfortable victory with 54 per cent of the votes against
40 per cent for Zyuganov. About 75 per cent of Lebed’s supporters had switched
their votes to Yeltsin.
It was a remarkable victory, given the low ebb of his popularity at the beginning
of the campaign and the disastrous nature of most of his government’s policies.
The reason for his victory was not that people liked him, but that they liked the
alternative even less. In Poland, communist candidates with social democratic
programmes actually won elections when the voters got sick of ‘shoclc therapy1.
The same could have happened in Russia if the communist party had put for
ward genuine social democrat policies. But Zyuganov was not a social democrat;
he made no secret of his admiration for Stalin, and this showed at the very least,
insensitivity to public opinion. When it came to the push, a majority of Russians
could not bring themselves to vote a Stalinist-type communist back into power.
They gritted their teeth and voted for the lesser of two evils.
11.3 Yeltsin's second term , 1996-99

(a) Economic crisis continues
As Yeltsin began his second term as president, the government put out lots of
encouraging announcements about the economy entering a period of growth
and the situation becoming normalized. Inflation was reduced to less than two
per cent per month and this strengthened confidence in the rouble. However, life
was still difficult for tens of millions of ordinary people because of late payment
i v
of their wages and pensions. Yeltsin cancelled some of the decrees which he had
announced during the election campaign; the reason given was that the money
simply was not available. It was claimed at the end of 1996 that the government
had only received one-twelfth of the cash from privatization that it had budgeted
for. Chernomyrdin, who had earned more respect than most of the government
politicians, remained prime minister. But surprisingly Yeltsin brought back Chubais
to run the economy, which meant a return to the rapid drive for capitalism.
Lebed did not survive long in his new post; Yeltsin found him difficult to work
with, and in October he was dismissed from the Security Council. The president
had a heart by-pass operation in the autumn of 1996 and was out of action for
several months. Early indications were that 1997 would be the turning point for
post-Soviet Russia; inflation was kept down to only one per cent per month, and
for the first time since 1990, production ceased to fall. Chubais was positively
euphoric: ‘it seems to me,' he wrote in February 1997, ‘that nothing can stop
Russia from a long, steep, powerful upward trajectory of growth, constantly gaining
in strength.'13
The promise was not fulfilled; one of the great weaknesses of the economy
was the lack of investment, without which no significant expansion could take
place. In the autumn of 1997 external events took their toll; there was a series of
crises and financial disasters in the Asian ‘tiger' economies - Thailand, Singapore,
and South Korea - which affected stock markets all over the world. There was a
fall in the world price of oil, because of over-production; the price per barrel,
which had stood at $40 in 1980, had dropped to as low as $10 in January 1998.
This was a disaster for the Russians, since oil was their greatest export earner;
projected profits from oil exports for 1998 were wiped out. Foreign investors
withdrew their funds, and the Central Bank found itself struggling to avoid
devaluing the rouble. Yeltsin responded to the crisis in March 1998 by sacking
his prime minister Chernomyrdin, who had been in office since 1992, and his
economics minister Chubais. The new prime minister was Sergei Kiriyenko, a
35-year old businessman from Nizhny Novgorod, who had been minister for
fuel and energy for only a few months. He could do very little to improve the
situation, and wage arrears mounted in all sections of the labour force. In May
there were widespread protests from striking miners demanding Yeltsin's
resignation (Document G). They expressed their feelings by blocking railway
tracks, thus preventing the movement of goods. As the protest movement
spread, the government seemed on the verge of panic; the economic crisis in
Indonesia brought down the Suharto regime, and there were serious doubts
about the stability of the Yeltsin government. The flight of capital from Russia
continued. Even the ‘oligarchs' were disgruntled and blamed Yeltsin; Vladimir
Gusinsky, the head of a bank and a media-company, stated publicly that
the newspapers and television companies that he controlled would no longer
support the president.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) helped by providing massive loans,
but the budget deficit was so large that these were used up within a couple of
months; the government had to spend much of its gold and foreign currency
reserves trying to maintain the value of the rouble at six to the dollar. By early
August this could continue no longer, or else the government would be left with

no foreign currency at all; and that would mean bankruptcy. Although Yeltsin
had promised that there would be no devaluation, it had become unavoidable.
On 17 August it was announced that a new ‘floating exchange rate’ had been
introduced. The government did not use the word ‘devaluation’, but in fact it
developed into something even worse - an uncontrolled free fall of the rouble. By
the first week in September the rouble had slumped to 20 to the dollar; it was
another financial disaster in which millions of people and institutions had their
savings and capital rendered worthless.
(b) Primakov to the rescue

As the government floundered, out of its depth in this crisis, the Duma suggested
a new prime minister, Evgeny Primakov, who had been Foreign Minister since
1996. To the surprise of mostpeople, including Primakov himself, Yeltsin agreed.
A veteran communist - he was almost 70 - Primakov had had a distinguished
career; he was a member of the Academy of Sciences, with a doctoral degree in
economic sciences, he had been Director of the Russian Institute of World
Economy and International Relations (1985-89), and was a member of the USSR
Supreme Soviet. He had been highly critical of the entire economic reform
programme, and believed that the state should continue to play a considerable
role in organizing the economy, especially industry. Western economists were
alarmed by his appointment, and the ‘oligarchs’were outraged. Although Primakov
was not a member of the new communist party, one newspaper owned by Boris
Berezovsky lamented: ‘The threat of a Communist comeback once again hangs
over a Russia which has been lacerated by the economic crisis. Once again, 4 s in
1917, intelligent, well-spoken, and educated parliamentary representatives are
leading the country towards a dictatorship.’ On the other hand, the ordinary
Russian public liked the appointment; even Roy Medvedev, who hardly ever
approved of anything that Yeltsin did, was almost enthusiastic about this: ‘As
I survey all the political leaders of today’s Russia, there is not a single person
I could name who would be more suitable for the job of prime minister than
Primakov.'14
Primakov had a clear programme: to make Russian industry competitive on
the world market, with support from the government; to reduce imports; to pre
vent Russian capital from leaving the country, and to attract foreign investment.
Soon after his appointment, the economic situation began to improve itself
almost before his policies had time to take effect. The devaluation of the rouble
made foreign imports more expensive; people were forced to buy Russian goods,
and this provided a boost for Russian industry. The world oil price recovered,
making Russia's oil exports more profitable. The government was able to repay
six billion dollars to Western creditors, wage and pensions arrears were paid, and
salaries and pensions were increased. The crisis was passing and opinion polls
suggested that 70 per cent of the voters approved of Primakov's policies. Even the
Western press was enthusiastic; the French newspaper Le Figaro reported on 28
February 1999: ‘The situation in Russia is stable, and the author of this surprising
stability is Primakov. His public image is of one who rejects confrontation and
works quietly. This has calmed and reassured his compatriots. Russian society
i v
470 Mastering Twentieth-Century Riîssian History
has begun to dream of wisdom like Primakov's becoming dominant in the
government.’ However, in Russia most of the press and two private television
channels did their utmost to discredit him. Ludicrously, they blamed him for the
collapse of the economy and accused him of preparing to organize a coup.
Suddenly on 12 May 1999 Yeltsin sacked Primakov and the team of advisers
which he had gathered round him, and replaced him with the Minister of
Internal Affairs, the 47-year old Sergei Stepashin.
Yeltsin gave as his reason for this ‘difficult but necessary decision’ the need
to appoint a younger and more energetic man as prime minister. This was
viewed with some scepticism by most observers: Primakov was only eight
months older than when he was appointed, and nobody could have shown
more energy in working to end the crisis. It was widely rumoured that the real
reason for his dismissal was his determination to root out corruption. He began
a campaign to find out how the vast amounts of cash were disappearing from
Russia. He had a list drawn up of the richest families in Russia and was in touch
with the Swiss attorney-general's office to find out who was responsible for the
huge deposits of cash in Swiss banks. He encouraged the honest members of
the Federal Security Service to pursue shady bankers, importers and exporters,
and government bureaucrats and bring them to court. Literally thousands of
criminal cases were started. Many people with media connections found them
selves under threat, and they had no hesitation in using their influence to get
rid of Primakov. When his dismissal was announced, there was consternation
and mystification among ordinary Russians. Yeltsin’s popularity rate fell to
only two per cent.
(c) Enter Putin

Yeltsin was already thinking about the Duma elections which were due in
December 1999 and the next presidential election due in June 2000. The consti
tution prevented him from standing for a third term, and so he wanted to make
sure that the candidate of his choice became the next president. In his memoirs
he argues that Primakov would not be right for president; he was too old and ‘he
had too much red in his political palette.’ For a time it seemed that Stepashin
might be the favourite to succeed. But he lacked experience and charisma; at one
point he declared: ‘Fighting against corruption and gangsterism - those are our
priorities.’ Perhaps that was enough to put paid to his chances of being elected.
On 9 August Yeltsin dismissed him and appointed Vladimir Putin, the director of
the security police, as prime minister, at the same time making it clear that Putin
would be his favoured candidate for the presidency. Under the terms of the con
stitution, if Yeltsin were to retire before the end of his term, the prime minister
would automatically become acting president for three months, during which
time elections for the presidency must be held. Putin was not very well known to
the general public; he was bom in Leningrad in 1952 and took a law degree at
Leningrad State University in 1975. He worked for the KGB in Leningrad for nine
years and then moved to East Germany where he served as a KGB officer from
1984 until 1990. Returning to St Petersburg, he worked for the city adminis
tration, and in 1994 became deputy head of the city government. He moved to

Moscow in 1996 and Yeltsirrappointed him head of the security services in 1998.
He gives 4he impression of being rather quiet, calm, serious and intelligent. An
article in Izvestiya described him thus: ‘Putin's rare television appearances are
striking for their extremely laconic quality. His rather acerbic manner, the tough
ness of an organization man, is rather pleasing in its own way, although this is
overriden by the coldly intelligent, impenetrable look in his eyes. He abides
strictly by the wise old rule - that language exists to conceal one's thoughts, and
facial expressions, to hide one's feelings.'
At first very few people took Putin seriously as a contender for the presidency;
the fact that he was Yeltsin’s choice did not seem especially designed to enhance
his chances of success. Primakov came out of retirement, announcing that he
was called to ‘save the fatherland.' He became leader of the Fatherland-All
Russia bloc, and the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, agreed to be his prime
minister. It seemed like the perfect ‘dream-team’, and Primakov began to be seen
as the most likely next president. But the situation soon changed dramatically; in
September 1999 there was a series of bomb explosions in Moscow. Two large
apartment blocks were blown up and over two hundred people were killed. Putin
claimed that the Chechen rebels were responsible and took the decision for an
all-out attack on the Chechen separatists. This time public opinion, outraged by
the bomb attacks, was all in favour of the war. Putin impressed everybody by his
decisive handling of the situation and his determination to wipe out the warlords
and their gangs of bandits. Once again, however, this proved difficult; two years
later they had still not been subdued, in spite of the increasing ruthlessness of
the Russian troops; tragically, it was the ordinary, innocent people of Chechnya
who were suffering most15 (Document F). \
In the Duma elections of 19 December 1999 the war did nothing but good for
Putin and the new political group that was backing him - the Unity bloc. The
media continued their anti-Primakov campaign and trumpeted Putin's success
in teaching the Chechen terrorists a lesson. Primakov’s Fatherland-All Russia
bloc won only 12 per cent of the votes, while Putin's Unity bloc took 24 per
cent, and the Communists 25 per cent. On 31 December Yeltsin resigned as
president (Document H), evidently feeling confident that Putin would be his
successor. Putin was now acting-president, and he immediately pulled off a
master-stroke: his Unity bloc formed an alliance in the Duma with the Com
munists; together with other small groups of allies, this created a pro-Putin
bloc with a majority of votes in parliament, something which Yeltsin had never
achieved. The presidential elections were brought forward with the first round
held on 26 March 2000. The main candidates were Putin, Zyuganov, Yavlinsky
and Zhirinovski; Primakov decided not to stand. It was no surprise when Putin
won outright on the first ballot, taking 53 per cent of the votes; once again Zyu
ganov came second. The Chechen war played an important part in his decisive
victory, but there was probably more to it than th at Most people were tired of
the years of economic hardship and dismayed at the decline of their country,
which had once been a superpower, and was now struggling to maintain its
position as a world power. There was a feeling that Putin had the intelligence,
the political acumen, the determination and the energy to bring some stability
to the country.
i v
(d) Past and future
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the Russian people
have experienced what can only be described, for most of them, as a nightmare.
In their attempt to push the country headlong into a fully-fledged market econ
omy, Yeltsin's governments made almost every conceivable mistake. Admittedly,
the communists had left a disastrous situation; probably no government in the
world has ever had to deal with such a daunting compound of problems all at
once; it was necessary to make the transition from a centralized command
economy to a capitalist market economy, and at the same time to create a demo
cratic political system. Their major mistake, in the view of many observers, was
to base their programme on advice from Western economists, who recom
mended a system based completely on market forces, underpinned by credits and
loans from Western governments, banks and the IMF. These Western econo
mists did not fully understand the system they were trying to reform or how dif
ficult it would be for the Russians to carry through those changes. One Western
economist who spent some time in Russia was Jeffrey Sachs. When questioned
about the reasons for the difficulties, he gave this reply: ‘When we undertook the
reforms we felt ourselves to be doctors who had been called to someone's sick
bed. But when we placed the patient on the operating table and opened him up,
we found that his anatomical structure and internal organs were completely
different, of a kind we never encountered in medical school.’16Sachs left Russia,
but Yeltsin persisted with a scheme which was inappropriate for Russia’s
situation. The result was bound to be chaos. The most distressing aspects were,
first of all, the way in which so many people took advantage of the situation to
get rich quick; many of the ex-Soviet nomenklatura, who had resisted change for
so long, decided that if reform had to come, they might as well exploit it and
make as much profit from it as they could. When a friend of mine, who was visiting
St Petersburg in 1997, asked who owned all the big black Mercedes limousines
with darkened windows, he was told: ‘The former Communist bosses - they know
the ropes!’ The amount of blatant corruption and criminality was astonishing;
vast sums of money which should have been invested in industry were salted
away in foreign bank accounts. When the financial catastrophe came in August
1998, one of the ‘oligarchs' was reporting as saying: ‘Well, we’ve made enough
money for ourselves now; perhaps it’s time to do something for our country.’
And secondly there were the social problems which the reforms caused, and the
poverty, which by all accounts was more intense and widespread than under the
final years of communism.
There were some positive aspects to the Yeltsin era; in the political sphere
progress was made towards democracy. If the system is not yet as ‘democratic’ as
that in the USA or Europe, again it has to remembered that it was not a question
of restoring democracy; there was no tradition of Western or any other type of
democracy in Russia. The fact that Duma and presidential elections have taken
place at all is a considerable achievement. Political parties are developing, and as
more time passes, it seems less and less likely that the country will succumb to
a dictatorship. The press and the other media have enjoyed greater freedom
than ever before. In the summer of 2001 the situation was looking stable and

promising. The economy at last seemed to have turned the comer, and during
2000 the average national income increased by around seven per cent. Thanks
partly to the high world price of oil and the continuing effects of the rouble
devaluation, Russia had a large balance of payments surplus. Putin has made
a good beginning; public opinion is firmly behind his policies and he has earned
respect among other world leaders. Like Primakov, he believes that the country
needs a strong government, with the state playing an important role in planning
within a mixed economy. The country has plentiful natural resources, the people
are well educated, there has been a promising expansion of small and medium
sized businesses, and the number of large businesses owned by Russian firms is
growing. But there is still a long way to go, and there are many questions which
cannot be answered at the moment. For example, can the developing economic
success be sustained? Will it benefit the great majority of the Russian people or
just the ‘oligarchs’ and their-associates? And will president Putin turn out to be
a democrat or an autocrat?
Documents
(A) Yegor Gaidar writes about Boris Yeltsin's qualities (1996).
His is a complex and contradictory character. In my view, his greatest

strength is his ability to intuitively sense the public mood, and to take that
into account before making decisions full of the greatest consequence. In
matters of fundamental importance he trusts his own political instinct far
more than any advisers. Sometimes in this way he makes the absolutely right
decision, but sometimes he is seriously mistaken. As a rule, what is to blame
in such cases is his mood, which changes fairly often and leads hiçi astray.
One of his great strengths is his ability to listen. A personal appeal to him can
influence him more than the finest, most carefully written document. But
a danger is concealed here: whoever gains his confidence and manages to
persuade him also has a chance to abuse this confidence, something that has
happened more than once, including in the making of very important deci
sions.
Source: quoted in Roy A. Medvedev, Post-Soviet Russia: A Journey Through the Yeltsin Era, pp. 16-17.
(B) Academician Oleg Bogomolov assesses the results of the first phase of ‘shock
therapy’, in an article in Moskovskie Novosti, 6 September 1992.
Falling living standards are outpacing the decline in production. Commodity

circulation is half what it was; the real income of the population is even less.
In comparison to lanuary 1991, the cost of living has risen twenty time over,
while wages for those employed in the national economy are only seven or
eight times higher... People &ie trying to adapt to the changing circumstances
I V

in order to survive... cultivating vegetable gardens and going into business
for themselves, mainly in commerce and services__ The attempt to apply
shock therapy in Russia following the Polish model and the advice of a group
of Western experts has turned out to be very painful. Will this attempt have a
curative effect? Doubts about that are prevalent. But hope remains.
Source: quoted in Medvedev, p. 24.
(C) Viktor Danilenko writes in support of the ‘Westemizers’ in an Izvestiya article,

18 August 1992.
Power today should be organized today in such a way that there would be
a government of property owners, controlled by property owners, oriented
towards the interests of property owners, and in all ways effectively open to
their influence. The most important government decisions should be made
directly by people who have shouldered the burden of property.
Source: quoted in Medvedev, pp. 24-5.
(D) Aleksei Ulyukaev also defends ‘shock therapy*, 20 September 1996.
When people perform a vitally necessary operation (in the absence of anti
biotics, sterile instruments, bandages and dressings, or even electricity) - what
they do is painful, and rarely does anyone express gratitude or have anything
good to say about them. On the contrary, harsh, sometimes furious, criticism
is their lo t... But what does that matter? Let out common monument be the
capitalism we have built through struggle. Amen.
CE) Vadim Kortunov, of the State Academy of Management, gives this devastating
assessment of the new class of businessmen, 5 December 1996.
The new generation of Russian ‘businessmen* has been formed... They are
either former members of the nomenklatura who were in the right place at the
right time when their enterprises were privatized, people who found it easy to
change their ‘Communist convictions’ for the psychology of monetarism. Or
else they are openly criminal elements... or else they were youthful new
comers who had not absorbed what they were taught in school but, to make
up for it, were not burdened with any symptoms of the thinking process. This
(continued)

generation of ‘new Russians’ is united by such characteristics as moral nihil
ism, a total inability to engage in spiritual or intellectual activity, a monetarist
psychology, and consequently a parasitic mode of existence displaying the
flag of ‘free enterprise’. It is therefore quite logical that the growing prosperity
of today’s Russian businessmen takes place against a backdrop of overall
decline in production, impoverishment of the population, inflation, and the
ruination of our country's economy as a whole.
(F) Boris Yeltsin justifies the Russian military actions in Chechnya.
These were military struggles against terrorists, not a war against a people.
I think it is high time everyone in the world understood that. International
public opinion would like to nail Russia to the wall of shame for its ‘war
crimes’. But the international community does not know, and does not want
to know the main reason for the death of civilians. We have never committed
mass executions of unarmed people in Chechnya. There have been no ethnic
cleansing or concentration camps. The main reason for the missile strikes and
bombs that have brought pain and grief to ordinary citizens is the war
unleashed by the terrorist against the Russian people. When I hear about the
‘war crimes' of the Russian army, I would like to ask about other ‘war copies'.
Isn’t it a ‘war crime’ that the bandits’ main source of subsistence is the
income from ransoms and the sale of people into slavery. In Chechnya there
are at least 2000 slave hostages, and the number is constantly growing.
Source: Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, p. 340.
(G) Boris Yeltsin’s account of the 1998 miners’ strike.
In 1998 the miners' protest banners included more than the usual economic
calls for back wages and so on. For the first time in recent years, the miners
co-ordinated a large-scale political platform and took to shouting, ‘Down
with the government! Dump Yeltsin!’ This troublesome resistance continued
for more than three months. The miners set up a picket line in Moscow, right
outside the House of Government, on Gorbaty Bridge, where they would bang
their miners' helmets on the pavement, declare hunger strikes and attract
reporters. News stories attacked the government. Celebrities and members of
parliament came to visit them ... The scandal was growing.
Vice Premier Oleg Sysuyev, responsible for social issues, raced from one
coal district to another, signing agreements almost without looking at them -
anything to come to terms. Ip one of these signed documents I noted a point
»v
conceding that the government agreed that Yeltsin must be dismissed Of course
this agreement didn’t have a legal leg to stand on... But it stood as clear evidence
that the government was nearly incapacitated.
Source: Yeltsin, pp. 171-2.
(H) Extracts from Boris Yeltsin’s resignation speech, 31 December 1999.
There is just a little tíme left before a magic date in our history. The year 2000
is approaching, a new century and a new millennium... My dear friends! My
dear ones! Today I am speaking to you for the last time as president of Russia.
Today, on the last day of the outgoing century, I am stepping down from
office...
I want to ask your forgiveness. I want to apologize for not making many of
our dreams come true. What had seemed easy turned out to be extremely dif
ficult. I apologize for not justifying some of the expectations of people who
believed that we could jump in one swoop from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian
past to the bright, prosperous, civilized future. I believed in it myself. But the
one jump didn’t work. I was too naive about some things... the problems
turned out to be far too complicated. Many people experienced upheavals
during this difficult time.
But I want you all to know something that I have never said and that is
important for me to say today: the pain each of you experienced was reflected
by pain in my own heart - sleepless nights, tortuous suffering over what must
be done so that people's lives would be just a bit easier and better. I did every
thing I could. A new generation is coming to take my place, a generation that
will do it bigger and better... In wishing you farewell, I would like to say to
each of you, be happy. You deserve happiness. You deserve happiness and
peace.
Happy New Year! Happy new century, by dear Russians!
Source: Yeltsin, pp. 386-7.
Notes
1. Anders Aslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy, p. 188.
2. Ibid., pp. 235-6, 251-6.
3. Roy Medvedev, Post-Soviet Russia, pp. 43-4.
4. Ibid., pp. 48-9.
6. Boris Yeltsin, The View From the Kremlin, p. 236.
7. B. Clarke, An Empire's New Clothes, pp. 234,240.
8. The following is based on the graphic account in Medvedev, pp. 103-130.
10. See J. Kampfner, Inside Yeltsin 's Russia.
11. Suny, p. 501.

13. Ibid., p, 282.
14. Ibid., p. 325.
15. Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War.
16. Quoted in Medvedev, p. 84.
• V
■ ü Suggestions for further reading
There is a huge bibliography on Russian history. This list contains all the books and articles
which I have found useful, and which are mentioned in the endnotes to each chapter.
Abraham, R., Alexander Kerensky: The First Love o f the Revolution, London, 1987.
Acton, Edward, Rethinking the Russian Revolution, London, 1990.
Acton, E., Chemiaev, V. and Rosenberg, W.G. (editors), Critical Companion to the Russian
Revolution 1914-1921, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana, 1997.
Aldridge, R., The Hidden Hand, London, 2001.
Anderson, R.D., Public Politics in an Authoritarian State: Making Foreign Policy During the
Brezhnev Years, Ithaca, NY, 1993.
Andreyev, C., Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Emigre Theories,
Cambridge, 1987.
Armstrong, D. and Goldstein, E. (editors), The End o f the Cold War, London and Portland,
Oregon, 1990.
Ascher, A., The Revolution o f1905: Russia in Disarray, 2 vols, Stanford, California, 1988-93.
Aslund, A., How Russia Became a Market Economy, London, 1995.
Bacon, E.T., The Gulag at War. Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light o f the Archives,
London, 1994.
Barber, John and Harrison, Mark, The Soviet Home Front, 1941-1945: A Social and Economic
History o f the USSR in World War II, London and New York, 1991.
Barmine, A., One Who Survived: The Life Story of a Russian under the Soviets, New York, 1945.
Beevor, Antony, Stalingrad, London, 1998.
Berkman, Alexander, The Russian Tragedy, London, 1989.
Berry, M.J., ‘Science, Technology and Innovation', in M. McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and
Khrushchevism, London, 1987.
Beschloss, M.R., Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair, London, 1986.
Bethell, N., The Last Secret. Forcible Repatriation to Russia, 1944-47, London, 1974.
Bordyugov, G A (editor), Gotovil li Stalin nastupatel’nuyu voinu protiv Gitlera? [Was Stalin
planning a military offensive against Hitler?], Moscow, 1995.
Brown, A., The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford and New York, 1996.
Brzezinski, Z., The Permanent Purge, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1956.
Bullock, Alan, Hitler and Stalin - Parallel Lives, London, 1991.
Bushneil, J., Mutiny Amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of 1905-1906,
Bloomington, Indiana, 1985. '
Carr, E.H., The Russian Revölution from Lenin to Stalin 1917-1929, London, 1980 edition.
Carrère d’Encausse, H., The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917-30,
New York, 1991.
Chamberlin, W.H., The Russian Revolution, 2 vols, London, 1935; this edition, 1965.
Channon, John (editor), Politics, Society and Stalinism in the USSR, London and New York,
1998.
Clark, R.W., Lenin, the Man behind the Mask, London, 1988.
Clarke, B., An Empire’s New Clothes. The End o f Russia’s Liberal Dream, London, 1995.
Cohen, S.F., Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, New York, 1973.
Cohen, S.F., ‘Bolshevism and Stalinism', in Tucker, R.C. (editor), Stalinism: Essays in Historical
Interpretation, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, second edition, 1999.
Conquest, Robert, Harvest o f Sorrow, Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, London,
1986.

Conquest, Robert, Stalin and the Kirov Murder, New York, 1989.
Conquest, Rpbert, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, London, 1990.
Davies, R.W., The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation o f Soviet Agriculture, 1929-1930,
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1980.
Davies, R.W., Harrison, Mark and Wheatcroft, S.G. (editors), The Economic Transformation o f
the Soviet Union, Cambridge, 1994.
Davies, S., ‘ “Us against them”: social identity in Soviet Russia, 1934-41 \ in S. Fitzpatrick (editor),
Stalinism: New Directions, London and New York, 2000.
Dawisha, K., The Kremlin and Prague Spring, London, 1985.
Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, Oxford, 1954.
Deutscher, I., The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929, Oxford, 1959.
Deutscher, I., The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940, Oxford, 1963.
Deutscher, I., Stalin, London, revised edition, 1966.
Dukes, P., ‘From Soviet to Russian History’, in History Today, vol. 43, August 1993.
Edmonds, R., Soviet Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Years, London, 1983.
Edwards, O., The USA and the Cold War, London, 1997.
Erickson, J., The Road to Stalingrad, London, 1975.
Erickson, J., The Road to Berlin, London, 1983.
Erickson, J., ’Barbarossa - June 1941; Who Attacked Whom?', in History Today, July, 2001.
Erickson, J. and Dilks, D. (editors), Barbarossa: the Axis and the Allies, Edinburgh, 1994.
Ferro, M., Nicholas II, the Last o f the Tsars, London, 1991.
Figes, O., Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917-21, Oxford, 1989.
Figes, O., A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, London, 1996.
Filtzer, D., ’Labour’, in M. McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism, London, 1987.
Filtzer, D., Soviet Workers and the Collapse o f Perestroika, Cambridge, 1994.
Filtzer, D., ’Stalinism and the Working Class in the 1930s’, in J. Channon (editor), Politics,
Society and Stalinism, London and New York, 1998.
Fischer, Fritz, Germany’s Aims in the First World War, London, 1967.
Fitzpatrick, S., The Commissariat o f Enlightenment: Soviet Organization o f Education and the
Arts under Lunacharsky, Cambridge, 1970. ^
Fitzpatrick, S., ‘The Great Departure. Rural-Urban Migration in the Soviet Union, 1929-33’, in
W.R. Rosenberg and L.S. Siegelbaum (editors), Social Dimensions o f Soviet Industrialization,
Bloomington, Indiana, 1993.
Fitzpatrick, S., The Russian Revolution, Oxford, second edition, 1994.
Fitzpatrick, S., Stalin’s Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectiv
ization, New York, 1994.
Fitzpatrick, S., Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Ufe in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the
1930s, Oxford and New York, 1999.
Fitzpatrick, S. (editor), Stalinism: New Directions, London and New York, £000.
Gaddis, John L., The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, New York,
1972.
Galeotti, M., The Age o f Anxiety: Security and Politics in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, London,
1995.
Gatrell, P., The Tsarist Economy 1850-1917, London, 1986.
Gatrell, P., ’Peasants and Politics’, in Modem History Review, April 1995.
Gatrell, P., ’Russian Industrialists and Revolution’, in Acton, Chemiaev and Rosenberg
(editors), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution.
Gershenkron, A., ‘Agrarian Policies and Industrialization in Russia, 1861-1917', in The
Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 6, part 2, Cambridge, 1965.
Gershenkron, A., Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book o f Essays, New
York, 1965.
Gerson, L.D., The Secret Police in Lenin 's Russia, Philadelphia, 1976.
Getty, JA , Origins o f the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938,
New York, 1985.
Getty, JA , The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction o f the Bolsheviks, 1932-39, New
Haven, Connecticut, 1999.
»v
480 Suggestions for further reading N
Getzler, I.pKronstadt, 1917-1921: the Fate o f a Soviet Democracy, Cambridge, 1983.
Gide, A., Back from the USSR, London, 1937.
Gilbert, Martin, Second World War, London, 1995 edition.
Glantz, D. and House, J., When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, Kansas,
1995.
Gleason, A., Kenez, P. and Stites, R. (editors), Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the
Russian Revolution, Bloomington, Indiana, 1985.
Gorbachev, M., Memoirs, London, 1996.
Gorodetzsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion o f Russia, Yale, Connecticut,
1999.
Gromyko, A., Memories, London, 1989.
Hagenloh, P.M.,1"Socially harmful elements" and the Great Terror', in S. Fitzpatrick (editor),
Haimson, L.H., ‘The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917', in Slavic Review,
No. 5, Columbus, Ohio, 1964.
Hanak, H., ‘Foreign Policy', in Martin McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism,
London, 1987.
Harris, JJL, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution o f the Soviet System, Ithaca, NY,
1999.
Harris, J.R., ‘The purging of local cliques in the Urals region, 1936-7', in S. Fitzpatrick (editor),
Hasegawa, T., The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917, Seattle, Washington, 1981.
Hasegawa, T., ‘The February Revolution', in Acton, Chemiaev and Rosenberg (editors),
Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution.
Haslam, Jonathan, The Soviet Union and the Strugglefor Collective Security in Europe, 1933-39,
London, 1984.
Heenan, L.C., Russian Democracy's Fateful Blunder: The Summer Offensive o f 1917, New York,
1987.
Hellbeck, J., ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul The diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931-9’, in
S. Fitzpatrick (editor), Stalinism: New Directions, London and New York, 2000.
Hill, C , Lenin and the Russian Revolution, London, 1947; this edition 1971.
Hoch, S.L, ‘Malthus, population trends and peasant standard of living in late imperial Russia,
in Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 1, Columbus, Ohio, 1994.
Holloway, D., Stalin and the Bomb. The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, Yale, Connecticut,
1994.
Hosking, GA., The Russian Constitutional Experiment. Government and Duma, 1907-1914,
Cambridge, 1973.
Hough, J., How the Soviet Union is Governed, London, 1979.
Hughes, J., Stalin, Siberia and the Crisis o f the New Economic Policy, Cambridge, 1991.
Hunter, H. ‘The Overambitious First Soviet Five-Year Plan’, Slavic Review, Vol. 32, No. 2,
Columbus, Ohio, 1973.
Hunter, H., and Szyrmer, J.M., Faulty Foundations. Soviet Economic Policies, 1928-1940,
Cambridge, 1994.
Hutchings, R.L., Soviet-East European Relations: Consolidation and Conflict 1968-1980,
London, 1983.
Hyde, H.M., Stalin: The History o f a Dictator, London, 1971.
Kampfner, J., Inside Yeltsin's Russia, London, 1994.
Katkov, G., Russia, 1917: the February Revolution, London, 1967.
Katkov, G., The Kornilov Affair: Kerensky and the Break-up o f the Russian Army, London, 1980.
Kenez, P., Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953, Cambridge, 1992.
Khrushchev, N., Khrushchev Remembers, New York and London, 1971.
Khrushchev, N., Khrushchev Remembers. The Glasnost Tapes, New York, 1990.
Knight, A., Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB's Successors, Princeton, New Jersey, 1996.
Kochan, L., Russia in Revolution, 1890-1918, London, 1966.
Koenker, Diane, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution, Princeton, New Jersey, 1981.
Kotkin, S., Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley, California, 1995.

Kuromiya, H., Stalin’s IndustrialRevolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-32, Cambridge, 1988.
Leffler, M.P., A Preponderance o f Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and
the Cold War, Stanford, California, 1992.
Leffler, M.P., The Spectre o f Communism, the United States and the Origins o f the Cold War,
New York, 1994.
Levin, N., Paradox of Survival' Thejêws o f the Soviet Union since 1917, London, 1990.
Lewin, M., The Making o f the Soviet System, New York and London, 1985.
Lieven, D.C.B., Russia and the Origins o f the First World War, London, 1983.
Lieven, D.C.B, Nicholas II: Emperor o f All the Russias, London, 1993.
Lieven, D.C.B., ‘The Aristocracy and the Gentry’, in Acton, Chemiaev and Rosenberg (editors),
Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution.
Lincoln, WJL, Red Victory: A History o f the Russian Civil War, London, 1991.
Luxmore, J. and Babiuch, J., The Vatican and the Red Flag. The Struggle for the Soul o f Eastern
Europe, London and New York, 1999.
Malia, M., The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991, New York and
London, 1994.
Malia, M., ‘Revolution fulfilled. H qw the revisionists are still trying to take the ideology out of
Stalinism’; review article in the Times Literary Supplement, 15 June 2001.
Mandel, D., The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure o f Power, New York, 1984.
Martin, T., ‘Modernization or neo-traditionalism? Ascribed nationality and Soviet primordial-
ism', in S. Fitzpatrick (editor), Stalinism: New Directions, London and New York, 2000.
Massie, R.K., The Romanovs: the Final Chapter, London, 1995.
Mastny, V., Russia’s Road to the Cold War. Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism,
1941-1945, New York, 1979.
Matlock, J.F., Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account o f the Collapse o f the
Soviet Union, New York, 1995.
Mawdsley, E., The Russian Civil War, London, 1987.
McCauley, Alistair, ‘Social Policy’, in Martin McCauley, (editor), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism,
London, 1987.
McCauley, Martin (editor), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism, London, 1987.
McCauley, Martin, The Soviet Union 1917-1991, London, second edition, 1993.
McCauley, Martin, Stalin and Stalinism, London, second edition, 1995.
McCauley, Martin, The Origins o f the Cold War, 1941-1949, London, second edition, 1995.
McCauley, Martin, Gorbachev, London, 1998.
McCauley, Mary, Bread and Justice: state and society in Petrograd, 1917-22, Oxfords 1991.
McDonald, D.M., United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900-1914, Cámbridge,
1992.
McNeal, S., The Plots to Rescue the Tsar: The Truth behind the Disappearance o f the Romanovs,
London, 2000. v
Medvedev, RA, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences o f Stalinism, New York,
second edition, 1989.
Medvedev, RA, ‘New Pages from the Political Biography of Stalin’, in Robert C. Tucker
(editor), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, New Brunswick, New Jersey, second
edition, 1999.
Medvedev, RA, Post-Soviet Russia. A Journey Through the Yeltsin Era, New York, 2000.
Merridale, C., Moscow Politics and the Rise o f Stalin, London, 1990.
Millar, J.R., ‘Mass Collectivization and the Contribution of Soviet Agriculture to the First Five-
Year Plan: A Review Article’, in Slavic Review, December, 1974.
Nove, A., ‘Industry’, in M. McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism, London, 1987.
Nove, A., An Economic History o f the USSR, 1917-1991, London, third edition, 1992.
O’Connor, T.E., The Politics of Soviet Culture, London, 1983.
Overy, Richard, Russia’s War, London, 1998.
Pethybridge, R., Witnesses to the Russian Revolution, London, 1964.
Pethybridge, R., The Spread o f the Russian Revolution. Essays on 1917, London, 1972.
Pipes, R., Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924, London, 1993.
Pipes, R., The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919, London, 1997 edition.i
i '
482 Suggestions for further reading \
Politkovskaya, A., A Dirty War, London and New York, 2001.
Pryce-Jones, D., The War That Never Was. The Fall of the Soviet Empire, 1985-1991, London,
1995.
Rabinowitch, A., Prelude to Bolshevism: the Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising,
Bloomington, Indiana, 1968.
Radkey, O.H., Russia Goes to the Polls: the Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917,
Ithaca, NY, second edition, 1989.
Radzinsky, E., The Last Tsar: The Life and Death o f Nicholas II, London, 1992.
Radzinsky, E., Stalin, London, 1996.
Radzinsky, E., Rasputin, London, 2000.
Read, C, From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and their Revolution, 1917-21, London and
New York, 1996.
Rees, EA, ‘The Primacy of Politics', in J. Channon (editor), Politics, Society and Stalinism in
the USSR, London and New York, 1998.
Remnick, D., Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days o f the Soviet Empire, New York and London, 1993.
Rigby, T.H., Political Elites in the USSR: central leaders and local cadres from Lenin to
Gorbachev, London, 1990.
Rittersporn, G., Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and
Political Conflicts in the USSR 1933-1953, Harwood, Chur, Switzerland, 1991.
Roberts, G., The Soviet Union and the Origins o f the Second World War 1933-1941, London,
1995.
Rosenberg, W.G., ‘The Constitutional Democrat Party (Kadets)', in Acton, Chemiaev and
Rosenberg (editors), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution.
Roxburgh, The Second Russian Revolution. The Struggle for Power in the Kremlin, London,
1991.
Sakharov, A., Memoirs, New York and London, 1990.
Sakwa, R., Gorbachev and his Reforms 1985-1990, London, 1990.
Salisbury, Harrison E., The 900 Days: The Siege o f Leningrad, London, 1969.
Schapiro, L., The Origin o f the Communist Autocracy, London, second edition, 1977.
Scott, John, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City o f Steel, Bloomington,
Indiana, 1973 edition.
Segal, G., ‘Ending the Cold War', in D. Armstrong and E. Goldstein, The End of the Cold War,
London and Portland, Oregon, 1990.
Serge, V., Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Paris, 1951; this edition, London and New York, 1984.
Service, R., Lenin: A Political Ufe, vol. 3, The Iron Ring, London, 1995.
Service, R., A History of Twentieth Century Russia, London, 1998 edition.
Service, R., The Russian Revolution 1900-1927, London and New York, third edition, 1999.
Service, R., ‘Joseph Stalin: The Making of a Stalinist', in John Channon (editor), Politics,
Society and Stalinism in the USSR, London and New York, 1998.
Service, R., Lenin: A Biography, London, 2000.
Shanin, T., The Roots o f Otherness: Russia’s Turn o f Century, vol. 1 Russia as a ’Developing Society’,
London, 1985; vol. 2. Russia, 1905-7: Revolution as a Moment o f Truth, London, 1986.
Siegelbaum, L.H., ‘Social Paternalism and Soviet Rural “Notables" in the mid-1930s', in
S. Fitzpatrick (editor), Stalinism: New Directions, London and New York, 2000.
Simms, J.Y., ‘The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different
View', Slavic Review, vol. 36, Columbus, Ohio, 1977.
Simpson, J., Despatches from the Barricades, London, 1990.
Slezkine, Y., ‘The Soviet Union as a communal apartment, or how a socialist state promoted
ethnic particularism’, in S. Fitzpatrick (editor), Stalinism: New Directions, London and
New York, 2000.
Smith, GAE., 'Agriculture', in M. McCauley (editor), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism,
London, 1987.
Smith, SA , Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918, Cambridge, 1983.
Smith, SA., ‘Factory Committees’, in Acton, Chemiaev and Rosenberg (editors), Critical
Companion to the Russian Revolution.
Steele, J., Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev and the Mirage o f Democracy, London, 1994.

Steele, J., 'Mikhail Gorbachev: The Russian Revolutionär/, in The Guardian, 18 August, 2001.
Stites, R., Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900, Cambridge, 1992.
Stone, N., The Eastern Front, London, 1998 edition.
Suny, R.G., The Revenge o f the Past, New York, 1993.
Suny, R.G., The Soviet Experiment, New York, 1998.
Taylor, R„ 'Soviet Cinema - The Path to Stalin’, in History Today, vol. 40, July, 1990.
Tolstoy, Nikolai, Stalin ’s Secret War, London, 1981.
Tompson, W.J., Khrushchev: A Political Life, London, 1995.
Trotsky, L, The History o f the Russian Revolution, London, 1932-33, this edition 1977.
Trotsky, L, Diary in Exile, 1935; this edition London, 1959.
Tucker, R.C. (editor), The Lenin Anthology, New York and London, 1975.
Tucker, R.C., Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above 1929-1941, New York, 1990.
Tucker, R.C., 'Stalinism as Revolution from Above*, in Tucker, R.C. (editor), Stalinism: Essays
in Historical Interpretation, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London, second edition, 1999.
Ulam, A.B., Lenin and the Bolsheviks, New York and London, 1965.
Ulam, A.B., Dangerous Relations: The Soviet Union in World Politics 1970-1982, London, 1983.
Viola, L., The Best Sons o f the Fatherland. Workers in the Vanguard o f Soviet Collectivization,
New York and Oxford, 1987.
Volkogonov, D., Lenin: Life and Legend, London, 1994.
Volkogonov, D., The Rise and Fall o f the Soviet Empire, London, 1998.
Volkogonov, D., Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, London, 2000 edition.
Volkov, V., "The concept of kuVtumost: notes on the Stalinist civilizing process’, in S. Fitzpatrick
(editor), Stalinism: New Directions, London and New York, 2000.
Waldron, P., The End of Imperial Russia, 1855-1917, London, 1997.
Walker, M., Martin Walker's Russia: Dispatches from the Guardian Correspondent in Moscow,
London, 1989.
Watt, D.C., How War Came: The immediate origins o f the Second World War 1938-1939,
London, 1989.
Westwood, J.N., Russia against Japan, London, 1986.
Westwood, J.N., Endurance and Endeavour. Russian History 1812-1992, fourth edition,
London and New York, 1993.
White, S., After Gorbachev, Cambridge, fourth edition, 1994.
Wildman, A.H., The End o f the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols, Princeton, New Jersey, 1980 and
1987.
Wildman, A.H., ‘The Breakdown of the Imperial Army in 1917’, in Acton, Chesniaev and
Rosenberg (editors), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution.
Williams, WA., The Tragedy o f American Diplomacy, New York, revised edition, 1962.
Wilson, E., Shostakovich, A Life Remembered, Princeton, New Jersey, 1994.
Yeltsin, B., The View from the Kremlin, London, 1994.
Yeltsin, B., Midnight Diaries, London, 2000.
I V
484 Suggestions for further reading N

lu Index
Abkhazians 425,465 and 1917 revolutions 81-5,92-6,103-4,

abortion 383-4 107,113
Acton, Edward 8 Soviet (Red) xx, xxvi, xxviii, xxx, xxxi, 121-2,
Adrianople, Treaty of (1829) 70 168, 174, 207, 279, 369,402
Afghanistan 69,70,404 during Civil War 146-8,187
Soviet invasion of (1979) xxviii, 378, purged under Stalin 236-7
391-2,398 in war against Finland 280-1
Soviet withdrawal from xxix, 402,410 during World War II 282-311,335-7
agriculture in eastern Europe 322,344,349-50,
before World War I 20,34,37-41,51 377,388
during World War I 79 reduced by Gorbachev 410-11,429
after October 1917 129-30,135 in Afghanistan 411-12
during war communism 149-52 in the Baltic states 431-2
under NEP 154-5,159-63,200-1,203-4,259 August coup (1991) xxx, 3,434-6,448-50
collectivization of 3,193,207-18,221,258 Aurora 107,117,299
during World War II 310 Austria, Soviet Peace Treaty with (1955) xxvi,
after World War II 313-14,345 362
under Khrushchev 352-5,369,371 Austria-Hungary 62-3,65,70-4,86
under Brezhnev 377,379-81 during World War I 75-7,93,133,143-4
under Gorbachev 405,409,422 autocracy 10,12,13,16,22-3,37,54
Akhmatova, Anna 252,313,359 Azef, Evno 49
Albania 73,269,368,413,416 Azerbaijan, Azerbaijanis xx, xxi, xxx, 20,
alcohol, alcoholism 137,223,384,395,405,455 166,168-9,241,257,424
Alexander II, Tsar xviii, 10,11-12,22,26,72 conflict with Armenia 418,425,428
Alexander in, Tsar xviii, 10,12,13
Alexandra, Tsarina 76,80,140-1 Babel, Isaac 252
influence over Nicholas II 79,87 Babi Yar xxiv, 292
Alexander Nevsky 256 Bagration, Operation (1944) 303
Alexeev, General Mikhail 104,141,143 Baikal, Lake 69
Alexei, Tsarevich 53,80,83,140 Bairoch, P. 39,42-3
Allende, Salvador 390 Baku 42,52,168,285,296
Alliluyeva, Nadezhda (Stalin's wife) xxiii disturbances in 428
Alliluyeva, Svetlana (Stalin’s daughter) 338 Balkans 62,65,70-4,86
All-Russian Union of Writers 251-2 wars in (1912-13) 73
anarchists 51,150,187-8 Baltic states see Estonia, Latvia and
Andreyeva, Nina xxix, 419,447 Lithuania
Andropov, Yuri xxix, 378,393,395-6 banking system 120,125,159,162,458
Anglo-Russian Agreement (1907) 62,69-70 Barbarossa, Operation (German invasion
Angola 391 of the USSR, 1941) 268,282-9,334
Anti-Comintern Pact (1936) 275,279 Bashkirs 20,168,174
apparatchiks, apparatus xiv, 383,419,429, Batum 134,296
442,444-5, 453 Bay of Pigs (Cuba) 365
April Theses see under Lenin Beijing (formerly Peking) xxx, 368,
Archangelsk 78,334 412,444
aristocracy see nobility Beiliss Affair (1911-13) 51
armaments 22,42,44,67,68-9,73,75-9,222, Belarus (formerly Belorussia) xxx, xxxi, 403,
225,237,269,288-9,291,294,303, 306,309, 437,467
312,355-6,361,362-3,365-7,369,378,382, Belgrade 348
390,405,409-10,443,458 Belorussia 20,26,135,166-7,172,241,
Armenia, Armenians xx, xxi, 20,149,166, 256-7, 406, 424, 428
168-9,241, 256,257,420,424,432 Beria, Lavrenti 241,257,314,327,333,
conflict with Azerbaijan 418,425,428 338,344-5
Army during the Great Terror 235,238,345
Tsarist 12,22-3,35,37,63,68-9 arrest and execution xxvi, 345
during World War I 75-9,86-7,98-9 Berkman, Alexander 110,157
Index 485
Berlin xxviii, 26,164,344,363 Caucasus 121,208,216,256,296
Congress of (1878) xviii, 69,72 Ceausescu, Nicolae 416
Treaty of (1926) 270 Chagall, Marc 177
Red Army capture of (1945) xxv, 268 Chalidze, Valeri xxviii, 386
blockade and airlift (1948-49) xxvi, 328 'Charter 77’ 377,388,416
Wall xxvü, xxx, 364-5,415 Chechnya, Chechens xxv, xxxi, xxxii, 20,166,
1971 agreement on 389-90 291,332,454,464-6,472,476
Bessarabia 281,292 Cheka (secret police) xiv, 120,125-6,130,137,
Black Hundreds 50,140 139,148,155,157,174,176,185,199
blat xiv, 247 Chekhov, Anton 23
Blok, Alexander 23,176 Chelyabinsk 294
Bloody Sunday (1905) 32-3,55-7 Chernenko, Konstantin xxix, 378,393,395-6
Bolshevik Party (later known as the Communist Chernobyl - nuclear accident xxix, 406,
Party) xiv, xx, 1,3,4-8,30-1,34,36,45, 410,448
50,51,52, 53-4,75 Chernomyrdin, Viktor xxxi, 453,457,463-4,
and the 1917 revolutions 83-5,92-4, 466,469
96-114,115 Chernov, Viktor 26,96,99,120,126-8
in power see Communist Party of the Chernyaev, Anatoly 404
Soviet Union Chemyshevsky, Nikolai 25,29
Bosnia 62,70-2,74 * Chiang Kai-shek xxii, 205,270,328
bourgeois, bourgeoisie 27-8,101,105-6, Chicherin, Georgi 165,205,270
139-40,157,175-6,181,230-1,251 Chile 390
Brandt, Willy 389 China xxx, 267
Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918) xx, 120, and Russia before the revolution 67-9
135-6,137 relations with the USSR xxvii, xxviii, xxx, 205,
Brezhnev, Leonid xxvii, xxix, 3,351,369, 270-2,328,342,367-9,389,391-2,412
372,377-95,410,443 communist victory in xxvi, 328
rise to power 377,378-9 and war in Korea 329
economic policies 379-82 economic reforms in 442,443-4
and eastern Europe 377-9,387-9 Chubais, Anatoly 456,459,463,467,469
Doctrine xxviii, 377,388,396 Chuikov, General Vassily 297,306
foreign policies xxviii, 378,389-92 Church, Russian Orthodox see Orthodox
and die 1977 Constitution 382-3 Church, Russian
assessments of 393-5 Churchill, Sir Winston *xxv, 283,285,321-2,
Britain xix, 62,270 339-40
relations with Tsarist Russia 65,69-70 Civil War 1,3,120-1,141-54,187-90
intervention in Russian civil war 121,142-3 causes of 120,141-5
Soviet relations with 165-6,267-77,283-5, events in xx-xxi, 120-1,145-8
320,328 reasons for communist victory in 148-51
during World War II 268,281,304-6, effects of 151-4,170
309,317 class divisions and conflict 4-5,11, \2,
Brown, Archie 385,413,417,420-1,429, 27-8,139-40,374,410
436.441 Cold War 4,268,312,316-29
Brusilov, General Alexei xix, 63,76-7,78, responsibility for 316-20
99,115 events during 321-9,391-2
Bukharin, Nikolai xxii, 124,133-4,154, 'thaw' in 362,389-90
167.195.198.230.241.251.441 end of 409-12,413,437,439
attacks Trotsky 198 collective farms (kolkhozy) 149,204,207-13,
supports NEP 158,160-1,200 263,352-3,377,381,456
opposes Stalin 201-2,206-7,209 collective security xxii, 267,272-8
his decline and fall xxiv, 235,237,261-2 collectivization xxi, 3,185,193,207-18,
Bukovina 281 251,256,258
Bulgakov, Mikhail 252-3,359 introduction of 207-14
Bulganin, Nikolai 241,332,344-6,350-2.362 results of 214-18,331-2,352
Bulgaria 72-3, 269, 321-2, 326, 412,416 Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic
bureaucracy 170,172-4,242-3,371-2, Assistance) xiv, 328,423
379,383,393-4,404,406-7,417-16, Cominform xiv, xxv, xxvi, 326
424,443-4, 455 Comintern (Communist International) xiv,
Bush, George 401,411 xxi, xxiii, xxiv, 123,146,164-5,195,267,
269,271-4
cannibalism 217,301 ‘command economy* 4,221,381,429
capitalists, capitalism 27-9,101,131,159-61, commissars xiv, 119
181,222,316-17,458,475 committees of village poor see kombedy
Carr, E.H. 6,83 Commonwealth of Independent States
Carter, Jimmy xxviii, 391 (CIS) xxx, 403,437
Castro, Fidel 365 communes see mir
Communist International see Comintern Curzon Line 147-8
Communist Party of the Russian Czechoslovak Legion xx, 143-6
Federation 459,462-4,466 Czechoslovakia 270,410
Communist Party of the Soviet Union Soviet treaty with (1935) 273
early reforms after October 1917 119 occupied by Nazis 276-7,285
and Constituent Assembly elections 120, after World War II xxv, 269,326
126-8 Warsaw Pact invasion of (1968) xxviii, 377,
wins the Civil War 3,141-51 379, 385-6,387-8
and treatment of nationalities 147-8, collapse of communism in xxx, 416
166-9
political structure of 169-70 Dagestan 166,174
and foreign affairs 164-6,269-82 Daniel, Yuli 385
and culture 174-80 Danilov, Viktor 385
purged by Stalin 185,230-41 Dardanelles 65,69,72,78
totalitarianism and the 1936 Dawes Plan (1924) 270
Constitution 241-4 de Gaulle, Charles 364
and World War II 307-8 Decembrists 24
under Khrushchev 345-6,351,358-9, dekulakization xiv, 209-14
361, 369-73 democratic centralism 158-9
and the missed opportunity of 1968 democratization 401,407,418-19
(Czechoslovakia) 388 Deng Xiaoping 444
and the 1977 Constitution 382-3 Denikin, General Anton xxi, 141,143-7,
stagnates under Brezhnev 392-5 149-50
Gorbachev's attempts to reform 401-2, deportations xxv, 240,256,281,291,304,
406-8,418-19,421-2,433 311,332,426
faces challenges 419-21,439 de-Stalinization xxvi, 331,342,
and the coup of August 1991 434-6 346-8,385
dissolution of 436-7 détente 368,378,383,389-92,397,404
assessments of 438-9,441-6 Deutscher, Isaac 5,197,208,236
Congress of People's Deputies xxx, 401, Diaghilev, Sergei 23-4
407-8, 419, 423,427,430-1,436 dictatorship of the proletariat 28,31,
Congress of the Russian Federation 453, 120,124,164,170,181,184,361
455,459-63 Dimitrov, Georgi 273
Conquest, Robert 185,217,232-3,235, dissent, dissidents 385-7,407
240,242 Djilas, Milovan 327,338-9
Constituent Assembly xx, 92,116,119, Dnieper Dam 220
155,185-6 Doctor Zhivago xxvii, 252,359
elections to 95,99-100,105,108,120, Doctors' Plot (1952) xxvi, 316
126-7 Don region 157
closure and dismissal of 109,120,127-8 Donbass 42
Constitutional Democratic Party see Kadets Dostoevsky, Fedor 23,359
constitutions Dubcek, Alexander 387-8,416
1918 169-70 Dudaev, Jokhar 464-5
1922 xxi, 170-4 Dudintsev, Vladimir 359
1936 xxiii, 194,241-2,257 Dukes, Paul 7
1977 xxviii, 372,382-3 Duma xiv, xviii-xix, xxxi, 6,11,36,
1993 453,460-1 38,44-9,53,57-9,74,75
consumer goods 225-6,312,345,357, during World War I 76,80,82,86-90
363,384,420 from 1993 453,462-3,465-6
corruption and criminality 244,246-7,393, Dumovo, P.N. 74
395,457-8, 464,465,471,473,476 Dzerzhinsky, Felix 125,137,199
Cossacks xxv, 141,149,312
Council of People's Commissars see East Berlin xxvi, 363,364-5
Sovnarkom East Germany see German Democratic
Crimea xxv, 147,150,291,295,332 Republic
Crimean War (1854-56) xviii, 22,69,70 Eastern Europe 269,317-28,348-50,368,
Cuba 374 377,387-9, 401, 408,412-17
missiles crisis 3,342,365-7,374 Eastern Question 70-4
Cultural Revolution xxii-xxiii, 251-8 Economists 29
culture education 125,175,190,225,247,249-50,
before the revolution 18,23-4 355,358,384,445
under Lenin 174-9,190 Ehrenburg, Ilya 335,359
repressive attitude of Stalin towards 244-58, Eisenhower, Dwight D. xxvi, xxvii,
313-14 362-4
under Khrushchev 358-61 Eisenstein, Sergei 107,178,256,310
under Brezhnev 385-7 Ekaterinodar 141
In d e x 487
elections German Democrat Republic (East
for the Dumas 45-8 Germany) 269,344,363-5,389,410
for the Constituent Assembly 126-7 creation of 328
for the Congress of People’s Deputies collapse of communist rule in xxx, 414-15
(1989) 401,407-8 German Federal Republic (West
under Yeltsin (1993,1995 and 1999) 462-3, Germany) 318,327-28,389-90
466,472 Germany xix-xx, xxiii, 62,270,458
Presidential (1996 and 2000) 467-8,472 relations with Tsarist Russia 65,67,69-70
electricity production 42,152,161-2,356 and outbreak of World War I 63,74
electrification 162 during World War I 75-9,93,98-9,102
Emancipation Edict (1861) xviii, 10,12,19 peace negotiations and Treaty of
Entente, Anglo-French (1904) 62 Brest-Litovsk (1918) 120,132-6
Erickson, John 288,293-4,302-3 inter-war relations with USSR 164-6,
Estonia, Estonians xx, xxiv, xxx, 20,121, 267-8,269-79
133-5,143,147,149-50,167,257,280, Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939) xxiv, 268,279
281,420,424,426-8,432 attacks USSR (1941) xxiv, 3,268
Ethiopia 391 at war with USSR xxiv-xxv, 3,268-306
defeated in 1945 306
factory committees 5,101,104-5,108, divided 318,327-8
110-12,120,130 reunited xxx, 402,415-16
famine xxiii Gershenkron, Alexander 7,43,50,208
of 1891 20,262 Gierek, Edward 388
of 1921 xxi, 153,155,162 Ginsburg, Evgenia 252,260-1
of 1932-33 215-17,332 Ginsburg, Moses 177
February revolution (1917) see glasnost (openness) xiv, xxix, 3,7,370,385,
revolutionaries and revolutions 401,403,405-7, 420,440-1, 446
Figes, Orlando 23,85,125,128,140,184 Goldman, Emma 188-9
Filtzer, Donald 220,223-4,226,229,244,331 Gomulka, Wladislaw 327,348,388
Finland, Finns 36,125,133,135,147,149-50, Gorbachev, Mikhail xxix-xxx, 3,7,183,330,
166-7, 299 370,385,386,401-46,454,467-8
war with the USSR (1939-40) xxiv, 280-1 his rise to power 396,403
First World War see World War I ideas and policies 401-9,446-7
Fitzpatrick, SheUa 7,54,207,218,233, foreign policies 401-2,404,409-12
238,243,244,330 relations with Yeltsin 402,430,440
Five-Hundred Days Programme (1990) faces opposition 402,411,417-22,429, 432
429-30 and collapse of communism in Eastern
Five-Year Plans xxiii-xxiv, 3,194, Europe 402,411,412-17,439
218-30, 331 and independence movements in the
First (1928-32) 202,205,208,218-25 republics 402-3,424-8
Second (1933-38) 225-6 failure of his reform policies 402,405,
Third (1938-42) 226-7 421-3,429-30,440 N
Fourth (1946-50) 312 attempted coup against (August 199Ï) 402,
Eighth (1966-70) 377,381 433-6,448-50
Ninth (1971-76) 377,381 his resignation 437
food supplies 77,81,89,100,129-30,137, assessment of 438-41
142,163,202-4,215-17,223-5,245,301, Gorbacheva, Raisa 404,436
345,355,357,361,372,380,384,422-3 Goremykin, Ivan 46
France 121,142-3,165,267-77,328 Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) xxviii, 220,386
Russian alliance with (1894) xviii, 62,67 Gorky, Maxim 56,136,175-6,179,189,247,252
treaty of mutual assistance with USSR Gorky Park 364
(1935) xxiii, 273 Gosagroprom 404
Franz Ferdinand, Austrian Archduke 62,74 GOSPLAN xiv, 218,309
Fulton Speech (Churchill, 1946) xxv, 322-3 grain, output, exports, requisitioning and
Fundamental Laws (April 1906) 44,47,59 procurements 39,79,122,129-30,139,
149-50,154,157-8,161-2,201-4,207,212,
Gagarin, Yuri xxvii, 356,375 214-18,221,313,345-6,353,355-6,380
Gaidar, Yegor xxxi, 453,455-8,460, Great Terror 185,235-41
462,474 Greece 321,323
Gapon, Father Georgi 32-3 Greens 142,150
Gatrell, Peter 17-18,40 Grishin, Viktor 404
Geneva 26,28,29,363,410 Gromyko, Andrei 366,389,393,398-9,
Genoa Conference (1922) 165 403-4
Georgia, Georgians xx, xxi, xxx, 20,36,37, Grozny (Chechnya) 296,465
52,134-5,142,149,166, Í68-9,172,174, Guchkov, Alexander 48,76,80,83
195,241,257,313,347,420,424,425,432 gulag see labour camps
declares sovereignty 420,425-6 Gumilev, Nikolai 176
Habsburg Empire see Austria-Hungary ‘iron curtain' 322
Hague Conference (1899) 67 Iskra (The Spark) newspaper xiv, 30
Haimson, Leopold 51,54 Islam 391-2,464
Havel, Vaclav 416 Israel 314
Helsinki Final Act (1975) xxviii,38 ludenich, General Nikolia xxi, 143-7,187
Hiroshima xxv, 306 Izvestiya, newspaper xiv, 95,112,114,
history of Russia, different interpretations 398,424,472,475
of 4-9 Izvolski, Alexander 69,73
revolution of February 1917 83-5
July Days (1917) 96-7 Japan xxiii, 62,69,267,458
revolution of October 1917 108-14 war with Russia (1904-5) 1,10,22,
violence and terror under Lenin 136-41 35,36, 67-9
assessments of Lenin 180-6 relations with USSR 121,205,267,
forced collectivization inevitable? 208 271-2,276-7,279,412
were Stalin and his methods necessary? during World War II xxv, 306
227-30 Jaruzelski, General Wojciech xxix, 389,414
responsibility for the Cold War 318-20 Jews 20,140,180
was Stalinism a continuation of persecution of, in imperial Russia 20,
Leninism? 184-6,333 50-1,53
should Gorbachev be seen as a failure? Nazi persecution of 292-3,335
438-41 under communism 180,250,308,313,360
Hitler, Adolf 267,272,277,320 Johnson, Lyndon 267,389
during World War II 279-92,295-6, July Days (1917) xx, 93,96-7,102, 111, 112
298-300,302,305-6,334
HoChiMinh 389 Kadar, Janos 327,349-50,414
Honecker, Erich 414 Kadets (Constitutional Democrat Party) xv,
housing 33,224,245-6,356,358,383,385 32,36,45-7,48-9,50,60,76, 95,99,
Hoxha, Enver 368 104-5,122,124,126
human rights movement xxviii, 377,386,397-8 Kaganovich, Lazar 231-3,235-6,241,
Hungary 343-4, 347-8, 350-1
briefly communist in 1919 164 Kalinin, Mikhail 200
after World Warn 269,321-2,326 Kamenev, Lev xxii, 108,195,271
anti-Soviet rising suppressed (1956) xxvi, disagreements with Lenin 106,124,196
342, 349-50 opposes Trotsky xxi, 198-9
end of communist rule in xxx.408,414 during power struggle after Lenin's
Hunter, Hofland 229-30,331 death 196-201
Husak, Gustav 388 downfall and execution xxiii, 234-5
Kanatchikov, Semeon 34
Ignatiev, Nikolai 71-2 Kandinsky, Wassily 23,177
India 69,166,281,368 Kaplan, Fanny 138
industry and industrialization Karmal, Babrak 392
before World War I 41-4 Katyn Forest massacre xxiv, 281
during World War I 77-8 Kazakhstan xxii, xxix, 166,168,212,216,220,
after October 1917 130-2,135,152 222,241,256-8,308,345,353,424,437
under NEP 159,161-3,191,200,201,204-5 Kennan, George F. xxv, 317-18,322
under the Five-Year Plans 194,208, Kennedy, John F. xxvii, 364-6
218-30,248,312,331 Kerensky, Alexander xx, 80,92-3,96,126
during World War II 308-10 as head of Provisional Government 93-4,
under Khrushchev 355-7 97,102-7
under Brezhnev 377,381-2 and the Kornilov Affair 103-4
under Gorbachev 405,409,422 loses army support 104
weaknesses 442-6 overthrown by October Revolution 107
under Yeltsin 456-8,470 KGB (Committee of State Security) xv,
inflation 78,100,130,151-2,162,405, xxviii, 185,361,378,386,394,395,
423,453,456,468 398,419,429,450,471
intelligentsia Khabalov, General 81
during imperial Russia 18,27-8,31-2 Khachaturyan, Aram 314
and Lenin 174-5 Kharkhov 217,220,295,302,303
and Stalin 246,251-6,313-14 Khasbulatov, Ruslan 453,457,461
and Khrushchev 358-61 Khodynka Field disaster (1896) 1
Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty Khrushchev, Nikita xxvii, 3,6,235,241,
(1987) xxix, 410 253,379,394
International, Communist see Comintern during World War II 297
International Court of Justice 67 background and rise to power 342,343-5
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 469 his agricultural policies xxvi, 342,345-6,
Iran (Persia) 391 352-5
Index 489
Khrushchev, Nikita (continued) Lenin’s decree on land (1917) and after 119,
his incluso?al policies 342,355-7 128-30,150,159
and removal of Beria 344-5 under Stalin see collectivization
denounces Stalin at 20th Party land captains 12
Congress xxvi, 183,327,331-2, Landsbergis, Vytautas 427-8,431
337-8,342, 343,346-8,373 Latvia, Latvians xx, xxx, 20,36,52,63,
and Eastern Europe 342,344,348-50,362-3 149-50
foreign policies 342,348,361-9 allowed independence (1920) 147,167
and ‘peaceful co-existence' 361-5,367 taken over by USSR (1940) xxiv, 257,
visits USA 362,363,364 280-1,426
and Cuban missiles crisis 342,365-7 occupied by Germans (1941) 426
and China 367-9 after World War II 426
downfall xxvii, 342,369-70 growth of nationalism and demands
assessment 358,370-2 for independence 420,424,426-8
Khryuchkov, Vladimir 430,433-6 Soviet troops intervene (1991) 432
Kiev xxiv, 13,42,47,51,146,216,290,292, Lavrov, Peter 25
303.311.335.360.406 League of Nations xxiii, 270-1,273
Kirgiz, Kiigizstan 20,166,168,174,241, League of the Militant Godless 250-1
257,384, 424 Lebed, General Alexander 465,467-9
Kirov, Sergei xxiii, 200,230-4 Left Opposition xxii, 200-1
Kohl, Helmut 415-16 Left Socialist Revolutionaries see Socialist
Kokovtsov, Count V.N. 57 Revolutionaries, Left
Kolbin, Gennadi 424 Lena massacre (1912) xix, 44,51-2
Kolchak, Admiral Alexander xx, 143-7,150 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich xxi, 1,3,4-8,83,179,
kolkhozy see collective farms 220,343,361,373,441,463
Kollontai, Alexandra 156 background and early career 17,29-30
kombedy (committees of village poor) xv, xx, as Bolshevik leader 36,50,53,84,92-4,
129-30 96-7,100-10,113-14
Komsomol (Communist Youth presses for immediate Bolshevik seizure
Organization) 214,220,224,235, of power 94,106
248.330.353.403.407 and October Revolution 106-10,113-14,116
Kopolev, Lev 216-17 decrees and policies 119-20,124-36
Korea 67-9 attempted assassination of 136,138
Korean War (1950-53) xxvi, 329,362 increasing use of violence 136-41,156-7
Kornilov, General Lavr xx, 93-4,103-4, and the Civil War 141-3,146-54 \
113,115-16,141 and War Communism 149-54
Kosygin, Alexei xxvii, 377,378,381,389 and NEP 122,154-6,158-63,190,204
Kozyrev, Andrei 463,466 and the nationalities 123,125
Kravchuk, Leonid 437 and foreign affairs 164-6
Krenz, Egon 415 and the 1922 constitution 170-4
Kronstadt xxi, 57,93,96-7,102, 111, relations with Stalin 123,195-6 \
122,153-4 and culture 175-9
Mutiny (1921) 156-7 illness and death 123,196
Krupskaya, Nadezhda (Lenin's wife) 175, compared with Stalin 184-6,333
182,196 What Is To Be Done? xviii, 30,158,181
Krymov, General Alexander 81 April Theses xx, 92,1Ö1-2,152-3,181
Kryzhanovski, Sergei 58 State and Revolution 169,181
Kuibyshev, Valeryan 198-9,231,234 Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government
Kuibyshev (Samara) 291,301 131
kulaks 38,129,137,160,201,202,206,259 assessment 180-6
definition of xv, 19,209-11 Leningrad (see also St Petersburg and
during collectivization 207-18,231,332 Petrograd) 182,195,232,234,235,
Kun, Bela 164 254, 280,290,312,422,471
Kunayev, Dinmukhamad 424 siege of xxiv, 3,268,290,295,299-302,336
Kuomintang 205 Leningrad Affair (1948) xxvi, 313-14
Kursk, Battle of (1943) xxv, 302-3 Lewin, Moshe 183-4,185,204,208,
Kuznetsov, Admiral N.G. 286 215,224
Kuznetsov, Alexei 314 liberals 29,31-2,36,95-7
Ligachev, Yegor 396,404,405,417-19,426
labour camps 185,194,228,231-2,235, Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963) 367,368
243, 281,309,311-13,332,344,347, Lincoln, W.B. 150
358,360,386 Lithuania, Lithuanians xxx, 20,63,133
Land and Freedom 26 allowed independence (1920) 147,167
land and land tenure taken over by USSR (1940) 280-1,426
before the October revolution 16,19-20, occupied by Germans (1941) 426
99,102,112-13 after World Warn 426
l '
\
490 In d e x
growth of nationalism and demands for Mikoyan, Anastas 241,316,325-6,333,
independence 420,424,426-8 344,346,348,351,378
Soviet troops restore order (1991) 431-2 Milyukov, Paul xix, 48,77,80,88-9,
Litvinov, Maxim xxii, xxiv, 267,272-8 95,98
livestock, slaughter of, during Mindszenty, Cardinal 349
collectivization 215-16 Minsk xxiv, xxv, 26,29,226, 282, 289,
living standards and conditions 290,311,437
before 1917 33,51 mir (village commune) xv, 12,19,25,
under Stalin 217-18,224-5,245-9, 38-9,100,217
260, 262-3 Mirbach, Count von xx, 136,137
under Khrushchev 345,352-3,357-8, Mogilev 76,81,103
361,363,371-3 Moldavia (Moldova) 256,257,311,
under Brezhnev 383-5 424,432
under Gorbachev 409,420,422-3,442 Molotov, Vyacheslav xxiv, 198,201,231,
in Eastern Europe 413-14 233,235-6, 241, 278,289,314-16,321,
in the Russian Federation under Yeltsin 325-6, 333,344-5, 347-8,350-1
456-7,463,464, 473,475 Montenegro 72
Locarno Treaties (1925) 270 Morozov, Savva 17,34
Lominadze, Beso 230 Moscow xx, xxiv, xxxii, 1,3,6,13,17,
London 30,270 19,36,37, 42,43,52,81,85,103,
Treaty of (1912) 73-4 105,120,171-2
Lunacharsky, Anatoli 175-8 Arts Theatre 23,176
Lvov, Prince Georgi xix-xx, 17,64,75,80, Soviet xviii, 105
92-3,95-6, 97,99,185,191 as the capital after 10 March 1918 121,136,
Lyashchenko, P. 39 146, 151, 155,164, 195,235,241,245-6,
250, 254, 257, 268,282, 289-91,345,367,
Machine Tractor Stations 352 387, 408, 417, 455, 472
Macmillan, Harold 364 during World War II 289-91,294-5, 321
Magnitogorsk 177,220,223-4,246, during the August 1991 coup 434-6,
259-60,294 448-50
Maisky, Ivan 276,283 during the 1993 power struggle 460-2
Makhno, Nestor 142,150 Mukden, Russians defeated at (1905) 68
Maklakov, V.A. 88 Munich agreement (1938) xxiv, 277,285
Malenkov, Georgi 241,344-6,347,350-1 Murmansk 10,78,143
Malia, Martin 244 Muslims 20,166,168,180,250,308,384,
Manchuria xxiii, 35,67-9,205,267, 391-2, 425
271-2,321 Mussolini, Benito 275,303
Mandelstam, Osip 252,263,358
Mannerheim, General Gustav 143,167 Nagorno-Karabakh xxix, 418,425
Manstein, Field Marshal von 298,302 Nagy, Imre 349-50
Mao Zedong xxvi, 271,328,367-9,391 Najibullah, Mohammad 411-12
market economy 409,418,429,437,444, Narkomindel xv, 270
453-4, 455-8, 473 Narkomprod xv, 149
Marshall Plan xxv, 318,320,325 narodniki (populists) 25-6
Martov, Yuli 30,108,183 nationalism, non-Russian 20,142,149-50,
Marx, Karl and Marxism 27-31,95,101, 174, 256-8, 311, 418,420,424-8
179,180-2, 248,357,418,438 nationalism, Russian 21,149-50,167,
Marxism-Leninism 4-5,30,180-2,368, 170-1,174, 256,313
372,395,404,442 nationalities and minorities 20-1,123,125,
Mawdsley, Evan 141,151 142,149-50,166-9,170-2,174,256-8,
Mayakovsky, Vladimir 23,174-5 311,418,420,424-8
Mazowiecki, Tadeusz 414 nationalization see state economic
McCarthy, Senator 362 ownership
McCauley, Martin 197,227,319-20,323, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty
331,333,347,370,372,436,440,443 Organization) xxvi, xxxi, 318,320,
Medvedev, Roy 160,216,227-9,232, 328,395,416,439,464
332-3, 377,385-6, 395,407, navy 35,36,57,68,93,96,102, 111, 156-7
461-2, 470 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (1939)
Medvedev, Zhores 377,386 xxiv, 268,277-9,288,426
Meir, Golda 314 Nechaev, Sergei 25
Mensheviks xv, 30-1,36,45,84,92,95,101, Nekrich, A.M. 286-7,385
104,105,108, 111, 112,120,122,124,126, Nepmen xv, 159,203,206
155,157,168,170,181,183 Nevsky, Alexander 310
Meyerhold, Vsevolod 176,253,359 New Economic Policy (NEP) xxi, 122,152,
middle classes, pre-1917 17-18,80,105 154-6,159-63,176,182,190,193,202
Migranyan, Andranik 442 abandonment of 203-7
Index 491
Nicholas H, Tsar xviii-xix, 1,4,10,41 after World War O 311,313,345
ideas and policies 50-1,68 under Khrushchev 352-3,357-8,371
and 1905 revolution 11,32-7 under Gorbachev 405
and the Dumas 44-9,53,59 Peking see Beijing
growing unpopularity of 53-4 People's Will (political party) xviii, 26
and outbreak of World War I 74 perestroika (restructuring) xv, xxix, 3,370,
during World War 1 63,75-7,87-8,90 401,403,404-5, 417-20,440-1
and February 1917 revolution 79-83,85 'permanent revolution' 164,199
abdicates 1,64,83 Persia (see also Iran) 69-70
death 140-1 Petliura, Simon 167
assessment 53-4,85 Petrograd 6,63,81-5,89-90,92-7,98-115,
Nihilists 24 116-17,132,133-4,147,151,155,176-7,
Nixon, Richard xxviii, 390 187-8
NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Soviet xviii-xix, 6,63,82,84,92-6,98-114,
Affairs) 234-5,238-9,281,291-2,332,344 116-17,137
nobility 13-17,22,80,83,234 becomes Leningrad 182
nomenklatura 393-5,424,430,459,473,475 Pilsudski, Marshal Josef 53,271
NovayaZhizn (New Life)(Gorky’s Pipes, Richard 7-8,45,50,85,96-7,104,
newspaper) 106,136 109-10,139,184
Nove, Alec 40,43,149,152,154,220,222, Platform of the Forty-Six 197
227,313,355,357,371,445 Plekhanov, Georgi 28-9,30,127,183
Novocherkassk xxvii, 141,361 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin 13
Novotny, Antonin 387 Podgomy, Nikolai 369,378
Novy Mir (New World) xv, 359,385-6,446 Podlubnyi, Stepan 214,217
nuclear accidents xxix, 406 Poland, Poles xix, 125,133,135,166,256,
nuclear weapons, development and build-up 268,270, 278-80
of xxvi, 312,314,319,329,362-3,365-7, before World War I 20,36,42,52-3,59
390-1,409-10 during World War I 63
war with Russia in 1920 xxi, 122,147-8,164
October (Eisenstein’s film) 107,178,256 during World War II xxv, 279-80,303-5
October Manifesto (1905) xviii, 11,32,36 after World War II xxvi, xxviii-xxix,
October Revolution (1917) see 269, 311,321-2,326, 342, 348,377-8
revolutionaries and revolutions 388-9,406
Octobrists xv, 17,36,37,45-6,47,48,60,76 end of communism in (1989) xxx, 389,408,
Oder-Neisse Line 317,321-2 414
Odessa 36,50,282,292 Politburo xv, 169-71,172-4,182,189,198-9,
OGPU xv, 174 200-2,231,234,242,312,378,383,386,
oil 42,227,356,381,423,454,457,469-70 393,394,396,411,418
Okhrana xv, 12,16,32,49 pollution 229,384,407,448
Order Number One (Soviet) 95,114-15 Poltava 34
Ordzhonikidze, Sergo xxii, xxiii, 168,172, Popular Front 274 N
231-2, 236, 247 population 10,13,20,37-8,78,218,’
Orel 146,150 224-5,245, 382,384
Orthodox Church, Russian 20,21,23, Populists 25-6,28
179-80,189-90, 250-1,308,360,464 Port Arthur 35,67
Osetins 425 Portsmouth, Treaty of (1906) 36,69
Overy, Richard 305,307 Potemkin (battleship) xviii, 36
Potresov, Alexander 183
Pakistan 411 Potsdam Conference (1945) xxv, 268,322
Panslav movement 71-2 Prague Spring (1968) xxviii, 387-8,416
Paris, Treaty of (1856) 70 Pravda (Truth) newspaper xv, 52,101,
Paris Summit (1960) 363-4,374 102,196,202,211,214,226,236,254,
partisans, during World War II 288,290,293-5 346,370,396,406
Pasternak, Boris xxvii, 252,359-60 Presidium xv, 170,242,344-5,350-1,
Paulus, Field Marshal von 297-9 369-70,378
peaceful co-existence 361-2,367,372,397 Primakov, Yevgeny xxxi, 433,454,466,
peasants 6,119-20,181,310 470-1, 472
before World War I 19-20,25-7,34,35, privatization 418,429,453,456-9,464,473
38-42,50,51 procurements see grain
and 1917 revolutions 97,98-100,102, Progressive Bloc (1915) 76,80,83,92
105,108,110-13 Prokofiev, Sergei 24,175,254,256,314
and communist land policies 128-30, Provisional Government (1917) 1,4,6,
142,155 17,64, 83, 92-117,136-7
during Civil War 149-50 rivalry with Petrograd Soviet 94-105
and NEP 158-63,190,200-1,203-4 overthrow of 106-8
and forced collectivization 193,207-18,222 Pskov 64,82,107,246
Pugachev, Emilian 140 Ryutin Affair (1932) xxiii, 230
Pugo, Boris 430,434-5,449 Ryzhkov, Nikolai 396,404,429-30
Purges xxiii, 194,226,230-5,261,311-12,
314-16,347 St Petersburg {see also Petrograd and
Putilov factories 17,52,80.81,84,112 Leningrad) 13,17,19,23,25,29,
Putin, Vladimir xxxii, 4,454,471-2 32-7,42,43,51,52, 57
becomes Petrograd 75
Rabkrin (Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet xviii-xix, 36-7,57
Inspectorate) xv, 196 after collapse of USSR 460,471
Rachmaninov, Sergei 178 Sakhalin 321
Radek, Karl 241 Sakharov, Andrei xxviii, xxix, 377,380-7,
railways 41,78-9,149,159,162,222 396-8, 406, 407,419,420
Rajk, Laszlo 327 Sakwa, Richard 408
Rakosi, Matyas 349 Salisbury, Harrison E. 283,302
Rapallo, Treaty of (1922) xxi, 165,269 SALT see Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties
RAPP (Association of Proletarian Writers) xxiii, Samara 143
176,251-2 samizdat (secret or self-publishing) 386,397
Rasputin, Grigori xix, 53,76,80 San Stefano, Treaty of (1878) 72
Read, Christopher 8,54,84-5,103, Sarajevo 62,74
111-13,153 Saratov 26,128-30
Reagan, Ronald xxix, 395,398,405, satellite states see Eastern Europe
409-10,443 Sazonov, Sergei 86
Red Army see Army, Soviet Schapiro, Leonard 242
Red Guards 104,107 science and scientists 162,249,312,314,
Red Terror 148,151,183,188 356,362-3, 371, 377,386,396-7
religion 20,21,125,179-80,250-1,308,360 'scissors crisis' xxi, 162-3
Remnick, David 419,447-8 Scott, John 223,259-60
repatriations xxv, 311-12 Secession, Law of (1990) 428-9
Repin, Ivan 23 Second Front (1944) xxv, 303
revolutionaries and revolutions 24-31 Second World War see World War II
1905 1,11,23,26-7,31,32-7, 55-7 Serbia 63,72-4,86
February 1917 1,4-5,79-85,89-90 serfdom, abolition of (1861) 10,12,16,19
October 1917 1,4-5,6,106-14,116-17 Serge, Viktor 187-8,262-3
Reykjavik, summit conference, 1986 xxix, Service, Robert 31,38,54,79,97,115-14,
409-10 141,174,184,202,215,240,331,372,
Ribbentrop, Joachim von 279 383,393,406,412,413,441
RÍ03 QA QQ Sevastopol 282
Treaty of (1921) xxi, 13,148 Shakhnazarov, Georgi 404,433
Right Deviationists 209 Shakhty trials xxii, 205-6
Rodzianko, Mikhail 59-60,75,81,86,90 Shatalin, Stanislav 429
Rokossovsky, Marshal Konstantin 298, Shevardnadze, Eduard xxx, 404,412,
304-6,312 416,431,434,435
Romania 72-3,256 Shlyapnikov, Alexander 156,158
relations with USSR 281,326 'shock therapy’ xxxi, 453-9,475
communist collapse in (1990) 416 Sholokhov, Mikhail 177,252,359
Romanov dynasty 10-12,32-7,44-54, Shostakovich, Dmitri 178,254-5,314,360
79-85,140-1 and the Lady Macbeth affair xxiii, 254
Roosevelt, Franklin D. xxv, 317-18,321-2 his Leningrad Symphony 255,301-2
Rostov-on-Don 33,141,268,291,294-5 show trials 205-6,236-8,261-2
Rostropovich, Mstislav 435 Shumyatsky, Boris 255
Roxburgh, Angus 418 Siberia xxii, xxviii, 30,38,51-2,121,137,143,
Russia, Tsarist 10-89 157,201,203,212,234,238,259,308,345,389
Russian Federation 402,433,453-77 Simbirsk 17,29,146
declares sovereignty 428 Simpson, John 422-3,438
economic problems and policies 453-4, Sinyavski, Andrei 385
455-9,464 Slavophiles 25
political problems 453-4,459-63 Smirnov, A.P. 231,258
Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic Smith, Steve A. 85,111
(RSFSR) 169 Smolensk 281,289,290,303,311
Russification 20,52,166,174,313 Social Democrats xvi, xviii, 28-9,33-4,
Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) xviii, 1,10, 47,60,127
22,35,36,67-9 split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks 30-1
Russo-Polish War (1920-21) xxi social reforms xxviii, 32,49,125,163,168,
Ruszky, General N.V. 82 181,247,355,357-8,371,384
Rutskoi, Alexander 453,455,457,461 'socialism in one country’ xxii, 123,193,199,
Rykov, Alexei 124,202,207,235,237,261-2 205,257
Index 493
socialist realism 194,245,251-6,359 death of 193,316,329
Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) xx, 84,92,95-6, assessment 185,227-30,329-33,336-9,447
101-2,104-5,112,115,119-20,143,155,169 compared with Lenin 184-6,333
early history of 26-7,34,36 denounced by Khrushchev at 20th Party
and the Dumas 45,47 Congress 330,342,346
relations with Lenin and the Bolsheviks 105, Stalingrad (Tsaritsyn) 220,223
106, 124-5, 135-8 during World War II xxiv, 268,295-9,311
Left 96,97,102,119-20,124-5,126,135-6, Stanislavsky, Stanislas 23,176,179
142,155 ’Star Wars’ see Strategic Defence Initiative
Right 96,106,112,126,135,186 state, meant to wither away under
and Constituent Assembly election 120, communism 131,142,169,181-2,331,361
126-8 state capitalism 131
repression and purges of 120,138,157 state collective farms (sovkhozy) 204,207,262,
Solidarity movement (Poland) xxviii-xxix, 352-3
378,389,414 state economic ownership 119-20,149-50,
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander xxviii, 360,377,385-7 152-4,159, 206-7, 215,463
Sorge, Richard 283,294 State Enterprises, Law on (1988) 408-9,423
South Korean airliner shot down (1983) 395, Stavropol 403
398-9 Stepashin, Sergei xxxi-xxxii, 471
Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers* Deputies 27, Stolypin, Petr xviii, 11,17,38-9,46-7,49,51,
36,57,101-2,103-14,128,131,142,156, 53,57
169-70,186-7,191 Stone, Norman 78-9,100
become Soviets of People’s Deputies Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT I
(1977) 382 and SALT II) xxviii, 378,390-1,399
democratization of 407 Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars) xxix,
sovkhozy see state collective farms 395,405,409-10
sovnarkhozy (regional economic councils) xvi, Stravinsky, Igor 24,178
355,357,379 strikes xix, xxx, xxxi, 18-19,29,33-7,44,
Sovnarkom xvi, xx, 119-20,125-6,128,169, 51-2, 54,60,78,79, 81-5,112,125,
172,242 155-7, 223-4,361, 420,469,477
Soyuz (Union) 431 Struve, Petr 32
space programme 356,363 Sukhanov, Nikolai 195
Spanish Civil War (1936-39) xxüi, 275-6,288 Suny, Ronald Grigor 179,185-6,203,459,464
Spiridonova, Maria 96,142 Supreme Council of the National Economy
Sputnik xxvii, 356,363,372 (VSNKh) xvi, 131,153-4
spy planes see U2 spy planes Supreme Soviet 241-2,382,407,419,453
Stakhanov, Alexei, and Stakhanovites xxiii, of the Russian Federation 453,455-7,459-63
225-6 Suvorov, Viktor 287
Stalin, Josef xxi-xxvi, 3,5-8,78,119,146, Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg) 294,454
166,182,343,360,367,369,372,385,
410,419,441,463,468 Tadjikistan 20,166,168,241,384, ^24,428
background and early career 195 Taliban 412
and die nationalities 166-9,170-4,256-8 Tallinn 427,432
relations with Lenin 123,170 Tambov 113,157,189
relations with Trotsky 148,199,258 Tannenberg, Battle of (1914) 63,75
and the power struggle after Lenin’s Tatars xxv, 20,168,174; 260,291,332
death 193,195-203 Tatiin, Vladimir 177
gets to supreme power 202-3 Taylor, F.W., and Taylorism 131,220
abandons NEP 201-2,203-7 Tbilisi xxx, 347,425
and the Five-Year Plans 218-30,312 Tchaikovsky, Peter 178
and collectivization 207-18,251,256,258, Teheran Conference (1943) xxv
331-2 terror and violence, drift towards
foreign policy under 267-8,269-82 under Lenin 136-41
introduces the purges and the Great Thatcher, Margaret 401,412
Terror 230-41,386 Tiananmen Square 412,415,444
and totalitarianism 242-4 Tikhon, Patriarch 250
and cultural policies 175,244-56 Timoshenko, Marshal S.K. 280
relations with Nazi Germany 267-8,274-9 Tito, Josep Broz 326-7,348,349,375
unprepared for German invasion 268, Tkachev, Petr 25,30
282-9,331 Tobolsk 102
during World War II 268,289-310,335-7 Tolstoy, Count Leo 23
meetings with Allied war leaders 321-2 Tomsk 238
repressive policies after World War II 269, Tomsky, Mikhail 202,207,235
311-16 totalitarianism 242-4,437,450
and the Cold War 268,316-29,339-40 trade unions 18,29,36,49,50,52,84,101,
relations with Eastern Europe 269,317-28 111, 120,155-6,158,223,355,407
♦
*'
494 In d e x \
Transcaucasia 42,143,168-9,424 and Afghanistan 391-2,398,411-12
Transcaucasian Republic xxi, 169,172, begins to disintegrate 424-8
230,257 end of xxx, 3,403,436-7,448
Trans-Siberian Railway 41-2,67,68-9, assessment 388,442-6
145-6,150 Union of Soviet Writers 252
Triple Alliance 62 Union of the Russian People 50-1
Triple Entente (1907) 62,70 Union Treaty (Novo-Ogarevo agreement,
Trotsky, Leon xx-xxii, 7,119,139,143, 1991) 402,430,433-4,436-7
155-7, 162, 170,259 United Nations Organization (UNO) xxvii, 321,
early career 31,36 328-9, 349, 362, 364,410,411
joins Bolsheviks and helps organize October United Nobility 17,80
Revolution 31,105,106-10,114 United States of America (USA) xxiv, 121,
and peace negotiations at 141,267
Brest-Litovsk 120,133 recognizes USSR 273
role in Civil War 122,145-9,187-8 as ally of USSR during World War II 268,
feud with Stalin 196-7,199,258,271 304-6,309,317
during power struggle after Lenin’s in Cold War with USSR 268,317-29,
death 195-201 389,395
disgrace and exile 148,201 and war in Korea 329
murdered on Stalin’s orders xxiv, 239 and Cuban missiles crisis 365-7
his writings 5,49,78,84 and détente with USSR 389-92,397
Trudoviks 45-6 and war in Vietnam 389
Truman, Harry S. 317-18,322-5 and end of the Cold War 409-11
Truman Doctrine xxv, 320,325 and responsibility for the collapse of
Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) 199 the USSR 443,450
Tsereteli, Irakli 96 Unkiar-Skelessi, Treaty of (1833) 70
Tsushima, Battle of (1905) 68 Ural Mountains 42,140,201,203,212,
Tucker, Robert C. 152,183,185,208,333 226,308-9, 334, 345,454,460
Tukhachevsky, Marshal Mikhail xxiv, 157,236 Urals-Siberian method 204
Turgenev, Ivan 23 urbanization 218,224-5,245-6,383
Turkey 22,62, 70-4,134,168-9,296,323,366 Uritsky, Moise 138
Turkmenians, Turkmenistan 20,166,172, uskorenie (acceleration) xvi, 401,403
241,424,428 USSR see Union of Soviet Socialist
Turksib Railway 220,222 Republics
Uzbekistan 166,168,172,204,241,256,
U-2 spy planes xxvii, 364,365,366,374 384,424, 428,448
Ukraine, Ukrainians xx, xxiii, xxx, 19,20,38,42,
112,133-5,140,141,142,146-7,149,167-8, Vasilevsky, General Alexander 298,306-7,336
172,205-6, 215-16,256,258,289,290,311, ‘Velvet Revolution ’ 416
334,379,402-3,406,424,428,437,448 Versailles Peace Settlement (1919) 165,275-6
Ulam, Adam B. 5,109,153,185,196,242 Vienna summit conference (1961) 364
Ulbricht, Walter 364 Vietnam War xxvii, 319,389-91
Ulyanov, Alexander (Lenin’s brother) 29 Vilnius 427,431
Ulyanov, Vladimir Ilyich see Lenin Virgin lands scheme (Khrushchev) xxvi,
unemployment 18,33,131,162-3,202, 345-6, 352-3, 369
204,384,394,429, 453,456 Vishniak, Mark 186
Union of Liberation 32,34 Vladivostock 41,67,78,143,412
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Vlasov, Alexei 291-2
(USSR) xxiii, 3,205 Volga region 20,143,153,203,209,216,
formation of 123,172 345,460
constitutions 123,172-4,241-2,371-2 Volga river 29,289,291,296,309,334,386
changes in composition of 257 Volkogonov, Dmitri 7,183,198,202,208,
under Stalin 193-340 212,231,233, 235, 287-8,307,330-2,
relations with the West 205,267-8, 367,372, 379, 392,394,396,441-2
269-82,316-29,339-40, 361-7 Voroshilov, Kliment 200,236-7,241,280,
war with Finland (1939-40) 280-1 300,344,347,350
during World War II 268,282-310,335-6 Voznesensky, Nikolai 314
reasons for Soviet victory 306-10 Vperod (Forward), journal xvi, 31
effects of World War non 269,310-12 VSNKh see Supreme Council of the
and Cold War 316-29,339-40,361-7 National Economy
and détente 389-90,397 Vyborg Manifesto (1906) 46
under Khrushchev 342-76
under Brezhnev 377-95 Waldron, Peter 40-1
under Gorbachev 401-51 Walesa, Lech 389,414
and relations with China 205,270-2,328, Wall Street Crash (1929) 222,271
342,367-9, 389,391-2,412 War Communism xvi, 122,149-50,152-4
Index 495
Warsaw xxv, 13,42,303-5,348 Yanayev, Gennadi 434
Warsaw Pact (1955) xxvi, 328,348-9, Yavlinsky, Grigory 429,462,467,472
377,387,417 Yazov, Dmitri 430,433,434-5,449
West Berlin 328,365,389-90 Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) 140
West Germany see German Federal Yeltsin, Boris xxix, 3-4,7,402,407,419
Republic background and early career 404,
Westerners 25 454-5
White House (Moscow) xxxi, 434,453, relations with Gorbachev 417-18,422,
460-2 425, 430, 433, 440
Whites and White armies xx, 120-1, elected Chairman of Russian SFSR xxx,
140,143-51 421-2
Wilhelm II, Kaiser 65,69 resigns from Communist Party 428
Winter Palace, St Petersburg 33,102, encourages republics to declare
107-8,177 independence 428,432
Witte, Count Sergei xviii, 16,36,37,41-2, elected President of Russian Federation 433
46,53,67-9 and attempted coup against
women 81,96,138,142,156,175,248-9, Gorbachev (August 1991) 434-6,449
260-2, 297, 383-4, 422 and collapse of USSR 440
the Wive’s Movement 249 as leader of Russian Federation xxxi,
workers, industrial 453-77
before World War I 18-19,27-8,33-4, his economic policies 453-9, 468-71
51,54,55-6 his power struggle with parliament
and 1917 revolutions 81-5,89,92,104-5, 459-63
107,108,110-13 attacks Moscow White House (October
after 1917 125,130-2,142,149,151,155-6, 1993) 461-2
163,169-70,175,182,200,204 health problems 466,468
under Stalin 194,222-30,238,245-9, wins 1996 presidential election 466-8
311,331 and the financial crisis of 1997-98
under Khrushchev 355,357-8,361,371 469-71
under Brezhnev 384 resignation and assessment xxxii, 472-4
under Gorbachev 404,409,420,447 Yevtushenko, Yevgeni 360,435,450
under Yeltsin 456,473 Yezhov, Nikolai 234,236,237-8,333,338
Workers’and Peasants’ Inspectorate Yugoslavia xxvi, xxxi, 282,321,326,362,
(Rabkrin) xv, 196 368,375,464 ^
Workers’Opposition 155-6,158,182 resists Stalin’s attempts at domination
World War I xix, 1,44,54 326-7
causes of 72-4 Khrushchev visits 348,375
Russia’s role in 63,75-9,86-7,92-3,98
peace negotiations 132-4 Zemgor 75-6,79
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk 135-6 zemstva (elected local councils) xvi 12,
World War II 194 16,31,34,47,49-50,75-6
outbreak and early stages 279-81 Zhdanov, Andrei xxv, 226,241,300-1,
German invasion of USSR (Operation 313-14
Barbarossa) 194 Zhirinovski, Vladimir 459,462-4,467,472
Soviet defeats in 289-93 Zhivkov, Todor 412,416
German occupation of western USSR 291-3 Zhukov, Marshal Georgi 279,286-7,291,
siege of Leningrad 299-302 294,296,298,300,303,306-7,309,312,
Battle of Stalingrad 296-9 345,351
Battle of Kursk 302-3 Zinoviev, Grigori 157,195,271
Soviet successes 293-4,298-9,302-6 opposes Lenin’s plan to seize power 106,
reasons for the Soviet victory 306-10 196
after-effects on the USSR 310-12 relations with Lenin 124
Wrangel, General 147 during power struggle after Lenin’s
death xxi-xxii, 196-201
Yagoda, G. 234-6,237,261,333 and Comintern 164-6
Yakovlev, Alexander 183,403-4,418-19, expulsion, trial and execution xxiii, 234-5
430,433,434,435,444 Zoshchenko, Mikhail 313
Yakutsk 51 Zyuganov, Gennadi xxxi, 3,454,459,462-4,
Yalta Conference (1945) xxv, 268,306,311,321 466-8,472
496 Index

Norman Lowe - Mastering Twentieth Century Russian History-Palgrave Macmillan (2002)

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Mastering

Tw entieth-C entury Russian History

Palgrave M aster Series

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No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or

The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author

First published 2002 by

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Printed and bound in China

[Poems from Mandelstam, translated by R.H. Morrison, Farleigh Dickinson

1 Introduction: Russia in the twentieth century 1

2 Russia before the First World War 10

3 The First World War and the collapse of Tsarism, 1914-17 62

4 The failure of the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik

5 Lenin and the Bolsheviks in power, 1917-24 119

6 Stalin in control - Russia transformed 193

7 The Great Patriotic War and Stalin's Last Years,1941-53 267

8 The Khrushchev era and de-Stalinization, 1953-64 342

9 The Brezhnev years - the USSR stagnates, 1964-85 377

10 Gorbachev and the end of the Soviet Union, 1985-91 401

11 Russia under Yeltsin, 1991-99 453

Suggestions for further reading 479

2.1 Western Russia about 1900 21

Extracts from A People’s Tragedy. The Russian Revolution by Orlando Figes,

Extracts from Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy by Dmitri Volkogonov, translated

apparat The administrative apparatus of the Communist Party

1854- 1856 Russian defeat in the Crimean War.

xviii Chronology of main events

1914-1918 First World War

xx Chronology of main events

Chronology of main events xxi

Chronology of main events xxiii

May-July Germans advance eastwards and reach Stalingrad.

xxiv Chronology of main events

Chronology of main events xxv

xxvi Chronology of main events

Chronology o f main events xxvii

xxviii Chronology of main events

Chronology o f main events xxlx

xxx Chronology of main events

Chronology of main events xxxi

I. I An overview of Russian history

Introduction: Russia in the twentieth century I

Introduction: Russia in the twentieth century 3

1.2 The writing of Russian history

4 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rucian History

Introduction: Russia in the twentieth century 5

6 Mastering Twentieth-Century Russian History

Introduction: Russia in the twentieth century 7

8 Mastering Twentieth-Century Rupiah History

The last three Tsars were:

10 Mastering Twentieth-Century Russian History

Main areas of debate:

• How active were the masses politically?

2.1 Russian government and society before 1905

Russia before the First W orld W ar I

12 Mastering Twentieth-Century Russian History

Ruling class (Tsar, court and government) 0.5%

(c) The elite nobles and the government

Russia before the First W orld W ar 13